#CIPD13 – Valuing your talent – Peter Cheese (CIPD)  and Dr. Anthony Hesketh (Lancaster University)

One-sentence summary: It is not easy to measure ‘Human Capital’ but people are our greatest asset so we have to do something and the Valuing your Talent initiative seeks to do something about this.

Peter Cheese opened the session with by talking about the imperative to make the intangible tangible, to recognise that we need measures around the most valuable part of any organisation, their people.

In response to this, the CIPD have today launched the Valuing your Talent initiative, and there are more details here: Valuing your Talent

Anthony Hesketh then talked about some paradoxes:

Human Resources vs Human Capital

People as Cost vs People as Asset

Intangible Value vs Tangible Value

Anthony looked at a number of frameworks that would help, and I’ll refer people to the Valuing your Talent website rather than attempting to capture all of the detail.

Judging by the questions from the floor and the activity I’ve seen on Twitter, this whole subject area divides opinion! Some reflections on the difference of opinion:

– HR, finance, and other stakeholders in the business have different needs and views

– This is really hard!

– The difficulty with measuring business value isn’t unique to HR/people, it is part of a much wider difficulty with getting line of sight from contribution to business value.

– Some people worry that this is a case of ‘finance talking over HR and applying their approaches’ and that is in tension with entrepreneurship/ intrepreneurship and adaptable organisations.

– There is a need to do something.

This is a really interesting challenge and it will be an interesting journey but, if we have good debates around this, we will achieve something significant.