Human Asset Management: A Journey of Discovery

By Robert Bluett

Human Asset Management is what I call the set of principles synthesized from my professional – and personal – journey over the last three decades. The systems I introduce in this book are designed to help you run your organization according to these principles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387794218

Book preview

Human Asset Management: A Journey of Discovery

Copyright

Copyright © 2018 Robert Bluett

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author.

Publisher: People Plus Systems

ISBN: 978-1-387-79421-8

Human Asset Management

A Journey of Discovery for Small- And Medium-Sized Enterprises

Foreword

Important – read this first

The ideas in this book are the result of a personal journey of discovery, starting some 30 years ago with my first job in what was then called the Personnel department. Not long after that, the Personnel era became the Human Resources Accounting era. By this time we were facing a great variety of challenges in different parts of the world, each of which became a great new learning opportunity, as the cliché goes!

Human Asset Management is what I call the set of principles synthesized from my professional – and personal – journey over the last three decades. The systems I introduce in this book are designed to help you run your organization according to these principles.

A note on this e-book

This e-book is searchable (Use Ctrl-F or Cmd-F).

The Table of Contents will be displayed in the usual way your browser or e-book reader handles them.

Most chapters also have a few terms that are explained at the end of the book in a note, like this example:

long house [32]

In the text, the number is clickable.

Any other text formatted in blue, but not underlined refers to key concepts that are explained in the Glossary of important concepts at the end of this e-book.

Prerequisites

Your company should already have in place a statement of its strategic objectives. You might call this statement a business plan or a company strategic plan or something else. In this book, I call it the strategic plan.

Your objectives[1] may be expressed in words, but for each objective there must be one or more quantifiable targets[2] to aim for. Chapter 3 of this book tells the story of how one company created its vision and mission, and looks at some of its goals and targets.

Targets are agreed on by the people in charge of running the company. We call these people the executive committee (often abbreviated to exco). The exco usually consists of all the department heads, and, if the company is a big enough – with several regions or sectors of activity – the heads of those regions and sectors are exco members too.

The person in charge of the exco, and therefore the boss of the whole company, will be referred to as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO for short).

It is also important to give some thought to your organization’s core values.

Core values

Your core values are the attitudes and beliefs that will drive your company culture.

Company culture

Your company culture is the typical way employees behave towards each other, and which characterizes the company as a whole.

As you will be asking your employees to fit into your company culture, it is in your own interests to decide what you want those core values to be.

The systems introduced in this book are the methods whereby we turn the principles of Human Asset Management into daily behaviors required of everyone working in your organization.

Finally, your company needs some kind of statement of the policies and procedures according to which everyday work should be carried out. Be warned, however, that this document by itself will not ensure that your business is either successful or sustainable. Chapter 4 tells the story of a company with plenty of procedures, but no guiding principles.

Among the essential systems introduced in this book are the job profile and the Key Performance Indicators[3] (KPIs). The essential systems are also called core systems in this book. Chapter 2 describes how the need for job profiles came about, and Chapter 4 looks at KPIs.

An employee's job profile contains the goals he or she must achieve. These goals flow directly from the targets in the organization's strategic plan. In this way, everyone in the entire company hierarchy knows how their job contributes to the company’s success.

Once you start to implement the core systems described in this book, you need to check regularly that they are being used. This means that the company boss – the Chief Executive Officer, or whatever you call this person in your organization – needs to meet once a month with the members of the executive committee (exco). At this monthly management meeting, they discuss what each member's team is doing to achieve the strategic goals of the company (as stated in the strategic plan).

To put it simply, the CEO is saying: Here is what the company is trying to achieve; how are the people in your department/sector helping us do it?

These meetings enable the CEO to stay aware of the challenges in each senior manager’s area of accountability.

The aim of the meeting is to reach agreement on how to address any problems that have arisen in the previous month.

Key concepts

Several conceptual threads are woven through this book:

A focus on employee engagement[4] (and indirectly on customer engagement).

Identifying and developing each employee’s strengths to create a strength-based organization – one in which most employees are doing what they are good at most of the time. (We call this working to your strengths.)

A focus on the five stakeholders, in other words the five critical players in any sustainable business: customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, the environment and society.

The five stakeholders

Here follows a quick history of where the five stakeholders standard has come from.

For a long time a company’s shareholders were the only ones given any real attention. Then, with increased globalization, new competitors arrived and existing companies lost market share to them. As a result, the customers – who now had a choice – started to be taken more seriously. At the same time the competitors began to tempt away the best employees, so employees too were recognized as critical to the sustainable success of a business.

The next development was that competition for resources highlighted the importance of suppliers. It was clearly a good idea to start treating them as the enterprise’s long-term partners.

The increasing occurrence of extreme weather conditions like floods and droughts has since then highlighted the importance of the raw materials suppliers rely on, which led to the environment being counted as a stakeholder for the first time since the start of the industrial age.

The latest – although maybe not the last – evolution has been the way society judges the company brand[5], that is, the ethics and values a company’s leadership is seen to be promoting. Society has become one more stakeholder whose opinion could make or break an organization.

The five stakeholders are an essential aspect of long-term, sustainable success when applying the principles of Human Asset Management.

Key principle

Human Asset Management can be summed up as follows:

In an organization, the focus must be on the individual, not only for the individual’s sake, but because this is an essential business strategy. This is the only way a company can stay on top of constantly changing challenges in the marketplace.

In other words, every aspect of business depends on the human factor to make it happen. What we are aiming to do, therefore, is to improve organizational performance through individual personal growth.

Scope

This book is not meant to be an exhaustive exploration of all of the aspects of Human Asset Management, but rather an illustration of how to apply the main concepts, which have been tried, tested and improved on over the past several decades.

Human Asset Management covers the following five essential activities: selecting talent, developing talent, motivating talent, attracting talent, and retaining talent.

As you may know, talent is a term borrowed from the theater and film industries. By talent I mean your human assets, because without them most of your potential customers would not be interested in your show – your product or service.

Here is a summary of what each of these means in the context of this book.

Selecting

Selection includes both recruitment and promotion. The qualities assessed in a candidate are both the can do factors (including education and experience) and the will do factors (like personality and attitude). Chapter 3 illustrates the importance of selection.

Developing

Having identified the potential – both realized and latent – of an individual, it is important to develop this potential so that both the person and the company benefit from it. Training, coaching, and mentoring are all used to this effect. Chapter 4 looks at some of the systems that will help you develop the potential of your people.

Motivating

Motivation is a vital part of developing the individual. I give additional emphasis to this critical area in Chapter 5.

Attracting

If you don’t get this right, selection is always going to be extremely difficult, because if you only attract unsuitable people, then no matter how efficient and effective your selection process is, it will be impossible to put the right person in the right job at the right time.

Attracting talented people is easy once your systems for Selection, Development and Motivation are in place and working well.

Chapter 6 focuses on this aspect.

Retaining

The retention of high quality people is important! Employees are happier and more effective when, in Human Asset Management terms, they are "working to their strengths"; in other words, they are good