A Book Review
The recent book by Sandra Burud and Marie Tumolo, Leveraging The New Human Capital: Adaptive Strategies, Results Achieved, and Stories of Transformation, is a terrific achievement. The work includes excellent overview essays by big thinkers, such as Peter Senge, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Robert Reich, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter. The essays cover the following topics: the importance of relational capital, the new leadership and the need for a better balance between work and family, along with in-depth case studies of DuPont, Baxter International, SAS, and FIN. The cumulative impact of these articles is quite persuasive, making a strong case that changing demographics and technology, the widespread emergence of the “knowledge worker”, globalization, faster product cycles and increased work hours are driving changes in human capital strategies. This book confirms that people increasingly drive business success, but also that today’s workers have a dual focus—family and work—and strive to achieve a good balance between the two.
The book would be worth your purchase just for these elements, along with its rhetorical contributions arguing for greater investments in people and lifelong learning. But it offers more. The work probably has one of the best and most current reviews of the relevant literature on the role of human capital in today’s economy. It covers hundreds of writings (550, to be exact). Rather than try to recreate the authors’ excellent work, I shall distill a number of bold statements on these issues:
- Downsizing, chaos and time pressure reduce employee creativity.
- Supervisor support increases it.
- Employees exhibit three kinds of commitment: job, career and organizational. Personal growth, rewards and close alignment of job and career goals with organizational goals have positive effects. Organizational commitment comes apart when a social contract is broken.
- Flexibility in terms of hours and other alternative work arrangements increases commitment. Work overload decreases it. So does lack of resources, role ambiguity and organizational double standards.
- Firms that fostered organizational commitment had higher sales, income and less personnel turnover.
- Lack of adequate child care options reduces productivity. Child care benefits and leave policies improve attendance and production.
- Customized work arrangements enhance productivity.
- Work redesign and self-directed teams do the same.
- Interpersonal skills among employees and especially management increase productivity.
- Valuing diversity, individuality and empowered leadership have positive results.
- Employee stock ownership is generally a winner for firms and workers.
- Good HR policies attract better job applicants.
- Customer retention enhances profits, growth and shareholder value.
- Happier employees increase customer satisfaction because customer loyalty is increased by favorable interactions with employees.
- Adaptive cultures and practices support better customer service and satisfaction.
- Developing employee skills and increasing their involvement has positive effects on customer service and loyalty.
- High performance workplaces, adaptive practices and a culture of valuing individuals reduce costs of all types: absenteeism, turnover, health care, overhead, labor and even legal costs.
It’s a virtuous circle: decent pay and benefits, training, empowerment on the job, work-family support, and high performance work systems raise firms’ returns.
Why don’t more firms adopt this “high road”