Why Should Employees Be "Cost"?

　　管理者都喜歡說“員工是我們最寶貴的資產”。然而，說歸說，很多人仍將員工當做成本來管理。這種做法非常危險，因為對許多組織而言，員工是長期競爭優勢的唯一來源。公司如果不在員工身上投資，不僅業績會受損，甚至連生存都會受到威脅。

Why should employees be "cost"?

Many enterprises still regard employees as costs, to a certain extent, because they have been unable to find effective ways to measure the contribution of human capital management to profits.

This refers to human capital management, including leadership development, job design, and knowledge sharing.

Happily, they now have a way to do so.

In the past ten years, we have developed a human capital management evaluation system.

This system can help organizations predict performance, determine the best areas of personnel investment, and correctly understand the long-term value of investment in human capital.

When constructing this system, the first thing is to determine which human capital management factors play a decisive role in organizational performance.

Through empirical research, we find that the core driving factors of human capital management that can predict organizational performance include five categories: leadership, employee work arrangement, knowledge accessibility, staff optimization and organizational learning ability.

Each class can be subdivided into at least four minor terms.

For example, leadership includes management communication, participation, management skills, executive skills, leadership development, and succession planning.

Next, we take the form of questionnaire to evaluate the practice of these five aspects, so as to judge the level of human capital management ability, identify the advantages and disadvantages of human capital management, and find out the relationship between the progress or regression of human capital management practice and the improvement or insufficiency of organizational performance.

In the assessment, we used 1~5 points to evaluate the maturity of each practice.

For example, in terms of executive skills, 1 points mean poor performance, i.e. low maturity; 5 points to good performance, i.e. high maturity.

Therefore, by comparing the maturity of several surveys before and after, we can find out the progress or retrogression of each practice, so as to identify improvement priorities and directly promote performance improvement.

　　新人力資本評估體系

Over the past five years, we have applied this tool to help 42 organizations improve their performance.

For example, it guides American Standard Companies to increase sales revenue and improve plant safety management.

It also helped Beaufort County School District of South Carolina find the roots of poor student achievement and improved student achievement.

In addition, we tracked 11 Financial Services Company and found that the higher the maturity of human capital management, the higher the returns of their stocks in the next year.

No matter what kind of organization you are in, you can use this framework for self diagnosis and improvement.

It should be noted that human capital management factors that affect performance will change as the organization and its environment change.

Therefore, it is very important to regularly measure and adjust human capital management practices and to identify their links with organizational performance.

To carry out this analysis, you need to collect two types of data: the quantitative value of human capital management performance collected by staff and management, and the quantitative value of organizational performance.

There are three steps to data collection and analysis:

1. investigate employees and managers to quantify the differences in human capital management maturity between various functions, business units, regions and jobs, and record the strengths and weaknesses of the organization in human capital management.

2. find out the relationship between the maturity of human capital management and key organizational performance (which can be financial or non-financial).

The purpose of this step is to determine which human capital management factors are most important to organizational performance.

3. use the findings of the first two steps to identify human capital management factors that can significantly improve organizational performance and need to be improved.

This step helps organizations identify the focus of human capital management and development.

　　根據自評結果和文中提供的對照表，你就可以判斷所在組織的人力資本管理的成敗優劣，并有的放矢地予以改進，讓人力資本投資的回報最大化。