Human Capital

Implementing the Workforce Scorecard requires a change in perspective, from seeing people as a cost to seeing people as the company’s most important asset to be managed—human capital. As discussed in the section “The Changing Role of Strategic Human Resources Management in International Business,” human capital is the collective sum of the attributes, life experiences, knowledge, inventiveness, energy, and enthusiasm that a company’s employees choose to invest in their work. Such an asset is difficult to measure because it’s intangible, and factors like “inventiveness” are subjective and open to interpretation. The challenge for managers, then, is to develop measurement systems that are more rigorous and provide a frame of reference. The metrics can range from activity-based (transactional) metrics to strategic ones. Transactional metrics are the easiest to measure and include counting the number of new people hired, fired, transferred, and promoted. The measures associated with these include the cost of each new hire, the length of time and cost associated with transferring an employee, and so forth. Typical ratios associated with transactional metrics include the training cost factor (i.e., the total training cost divided by the number of employees trained) and training cost percentage (i.e., the total training cost divided by the operating expense).^[4] But these transactional measures don’t get at the strategic issues—namely, whether the right employees are being trained and whether they’re remembering and using what they learned. Measuring training effectiveness requires not only devising metrics but also changing the nature of the training.

The BMO Bank of Montreal has taken this step. “What we’re trying to do at the Bank of Montreal is to build learning into what it is that people are doing,” said Jim Rush of the Bank of Montreal’s Institute for Learning. “The difficulty with training as we once conceived it is that you’re taken off your job, you’re taken out of context, you’re taken away from those things that you’re currently working on, and you go through some kind of training. And then you’ve got to come back and begin to apply that. Well, you walk back to that environment and it hasn’t changed. It’s not supportive or conducive to you behaving in a different kind of way, so you revert back to the way you were, very naturally.” To overcome this, the bank conducts training such that teams bring in specific tasks on which they’re working, so that they learn by doing. This removes the gap between learning in one context and applying it in another. The bank then looks at performance indices directly related to the bottom line. “If we take an entire business unit through a program designed to help them learn how to increase the market share of a particular product, we can look at market share and see if it improved after the training,” Rush said.^[5]

Motorola has adopted a similar approach, using action learning in its Senior Executive Program. Action learning teams are assigned a specific project by Motorola’s CEO and are responsible for implementing the solutions they design. This approach not only educates the team members but also lets them implement the ideas, so they’re in a position to influence the organization. In this way, the training seamlessly supports Motorola’s goals.

As you can see in these examples, organizations need employees to apply their knowledge to activities that add value to the company. In planning and applying human capital measures, managers should use both retrospective (lagging) and prospective (leading) indicators. Lagging indicators are those that tell the company what it has accomplished (e.g., the Bank of Montreal’s documenting the effect that training had on a business unit’s performance). Leading indicators are forecasts that help an organization see where it is headed. Leading indicators include employee learning and growth indices.^[6]

The Payoff

Given the complexity of trying to measure intangibles with metrics and a scorecard, some managers may be inclined to ask, “Why bother doing all this?” Research by John Lingle and William Schiemann provides a clear answer. Companies that make a concerted effort to measure intangibles such as employee performance, innovation, and change in addition to measuring financial benchmarks perform better. Lingle and Schiemann examined how executives measured six strategic performance areas: (1) financial performance, (2) operating efficiency, (3) customer satisfaction, (4) employee performance, (5) innovation and change, and (6) community/environment issues. To evaluate how carefully the measures were tracked, the researchers asked the executives, “How highly do you value the information in each strategic performance area?” and “Would you bet your job on the quality of the information on each of these areas?” The researchers found that the companies that paid the closest attention to the metrics and had the most credible information were the ones that had been identified as industry leaders over the previous three years (e.g., 74 percent of measurement-managed companies but only 44 percent of others) and reported financial performance in the top third of their industry (e.g., 83 percent compared with 52 percent).^[10]

The Workforce Scorecard is vital because most organizations have much better control and accountability over their raw materials than they do over their workforce. For example, a retailer can quickly identify the source of a bad product, but the same retailer can’t identify a poor manager whose negative attitude is poisoning morale and strategic execution.^[11]