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“People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn't make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.” Mary Kay Ash People first, Strategy second
In the 21st century, human capital plays a crucial role in the health of the company. Managers must be able to accurately evaluate and monitor their workers. Only then can they effectively allocate and manage human resources to achieve the strategic goals of the company. Current human resource assessment is focused on the deliverables of the employees; their performance is measured by their sales figures, projects and tasks completed. While it is important to focus on these tangible results, the intangible aspects of human resource must not be overlooked. Intangible measurements include working habits of employees (ie, diligence), their working mood (ie, job satisfaction, employee grievances), their attitudes (ie, employee loyalty, relationship with colleagues), initiative (thinking out of the box, employee suggestions) and ambition (personal development and advancement). Tangible results are easy to evaluate since they can be reduced to numbers and figures. On the other hand, intangibles are subjective and more difficult to assess yet they are just as important. Our group had ambitiously introduced the Company Assessment Reporting System (C.A.R.S.) in an attempt to use technology to provide a solution for human resource management. We obtained our inspiration from Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard. This is a method devised to measure a company’s activities in terms of its vision and strategies. The Balanced Scorecard attempts to give management a comprehensive view of the performance of their business and focuses management’s attention on the important metrics that drive success. C.A.R.S. attempts to measure the intangible aspects of employees such as their happiness level, stress level, job satisfaction level and motivation level. We feel that these factors contribute to the productivity and efficiency of workers and managers should pay close attention to these often-overlooked details
C.A.R.S. is a tool that the manager can use to aid in the macro-management of the company by functioning as a balanced scorecard on the “health” of the workers. It allows the manager a comprehensive view of the various factors that affects the performance of his/her workers and this summary of data is presented in the form of a dashboard to give the manager an overall big picture. Looking at the dashboard, the manager is able to develop a top-down approach strategy to better manage his people. For example, if the manager finds that the sales department is lacking in motivation, he can use C.A.R.S. to seek recommendations and stimulate the results of these recommendations. At the same time, C.A.R.S. can be used to micro-manage the workers. The manager is able to log onto each employee’s personal assessment to check on his overall “health”. Looking at individual statistics, the manager is able to pin-point any problems that the employee is facing and work out possible solutions, for example is the employee too overwhelmed with work such that he is always feeling unhappy? Is the employee really doing a lot of work or is he loafing? Check his peer appraisal to find out! For the employee, C.A.R.S. serves as an interactive system between management and the workers. He/She can use it as: (1) a feedback system to the manager, for example, the employee can adjust his daily mood level (2) a peer appraisal and boss appraisal system to voice out any grievances (3) a job organizer which the employee can use to accept projects assigned to him and keep track of the progress of his/her projects. Using C.A.R.S., we are trying to bring across two messages. First, C.A.R.S. explores the possibilities of adding value to management through the use of technology. C.A.R.S. is able to process massive amount of data and then present them in the form of “gauges on a dashboard” to allow for top-down strategic planning of human resources by the manager. On the other hand, C.A.R.S. also allows for bottom-up management of the workers by the manager since he is able to gain access to each individual’s data profile. Second, C.A.R.S. attempts to measure human capital in a company through unconventional means – assessing the intangible factors. We feel that this is an overlooked area of human resource management and the impact of these intangible factors should not be underestimated. However, we also understand that it is a challenge for any company or system that attempts to quantify intangible measures. We acknowledge that individuals will have different thresholds, for example some people may perform well under stress whereas others will simply break down if there’s too much pressure. Hence there are also limitations to the measure of intangible performance indicators. Bringing the use of measurement of performance indicators to the extreme, we explore the situations in which there is too much information for the manager to evaluate; the employee may feel that he/she is being evaluated all the time; the use of unconventional indicators such as measuring the number of times the employee makes to the pantry to evaluate idleness. This also brings up the question of whether intangible measurements may be overrated. Through C.A.R.S., our group hopes to create awareness on the use of intangible performance indicators to evaluate human capital and its usefulness in assisting in the strategic planning of resource allocation. (Click on C.A.R.S logo to get to application.)
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