Laurie Bassi

Daniel McMurrer

Managers are fond of the maxim “Employees are our most important asset.” Yet beneath the rhetoric, too many executives still regard—and manage—employees as costs. That’s dangerous because, for many companies, people are the only source of long-term competitive advantage. Companies that fail to invest in employees jeopardize their own success and even survival. In part, this practice has lingered for lack of alternatives. Until recently, there simply weren’t robust methods for measuring the bottom-line contributions of investments in human capital management (HCM)—things like leadership development, job design, and knowledge sharing. That’s changed. Over the past decade, we have worked with colleagues worldwide to develop a system for assessing HCM, predicting organizational performance, and guiding organizations’ investments in people.

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Reprint: R0703H
Though most traditional HR performance metrics don&#8217;t predict organizational performance, alternatives simply have not existed&#8212;until now. During the past ten years, researchers Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer have worked to develop a system that allows executives to assess human capital management (HCM) and to use those metrics both to predict organizational performance and to guide organizations&#8217; investments in people.
The new framework is based on a core set of HCM drivers that fall into five major categories: leadership practices, employee engagement, knowledge accessibility, workforce optimization, and organizational learning capacity. By employing rigorously designed surveys to score a company on the range of HCM practices across the five categories, it&#8217;s possible to benchmark organizational HCM capabilities, identify HCM strengths and weaknesses, and link improvements or backsliding in specific HCM practices with improvements or shortcomings in organizational performance.
The process requires determining a &#8220;maturity&#8221; score for each practice, based on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). Over time, evolving maturity scores from multiple surveys can reveal progress in each of the HCM practices and help a company decide where to focus improvement efforts that will have a direct impact on performance. The authors draw from their work with American Standard, South Carolina&#8217;s Beaufort County School District, and a bevy of financial firms to show how improving HCM scores led to increased sales, safety, academic test scores, and stock returns.
Bassi and McMurrer urge HR departments to move beyond the usual metrics and begin using HCM measurement tools to gauge how well people are managed and developed throughout the organization. In this new role, according to the authors, HR can take on strategic responsibility and ensure that superior human capital management becomes central to the organization&#8217;s culture.

Maximizing Your Return on People

Reprint: R0703H Though most traditional HR performance metrics don’t predict organizational performance, alternatives simply have not existed—until now. During the past ten years, researchers Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer have worked to develop a system that allows executives to assess human capital management (HCM) and to use those metrics both to predict organizational performance and to guide organizations’ investments in people. The new framework is based on a core set of HCM drivers that fall into five major categories: leadership practices, employee engagement, knowledge accessibility, workforce optimization, and organizational learning capacity. By employing rigorously designed surveys to score a company on the range of HCM practices across the five categories, it’s possible to benchmark organizational HCM capabilities, identify HCM strengths and weaknesses, and link improvements or backsliding in specific HCM practices with improvements or shortcomings in organizational performance. The process requires determining a “maturity” score for each practice, based on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). Over time, evolving maturity scores from multiple surveys can reveal progress in each of the HCM practices and help a company decide where to focus improvement efforts that will have a direct impact on performance. The authors draw from their work with American Standard, South Carolina’s Beaufort County School District, and a bevy of financial firms to show how improving HCM scores led to increased sales, safety, academic test scores, and stock returns. Bassi and McMurrer urge HR departments to move beyond the usual metrics and begin using HCM measurement tools to gauge how well people are managed and developed throughout the organization. In this new role, according to the authors, HR can take on strategic responsibility and ensure that superior human capital management becomes central to the organization’s culture.

Maximizing Your Return on People

Summary.

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