We have undertaken a number of major research studies examing human capital and its implications for HR practitioners.
- The University of Bath has been carrying out an extensive study for us looking at the relationship between people and business performance. The latest report from the study is Managing across Boundaries: Human Resource Management beyond the Firm, for which the Bath team worked with a team at Cornell University. Increasingly, organisational boundaries are becoming blurred as not all of the people contributing to the performance of an organisation are employed within it. The report looks at how HRM practices and processes can successfully manage effort outside the boundaries of the firm and at what this means for building the different forms of capital. A detailed case study examines the nature of human and social capital in McKinsey & Co.
- Angela Baron, CIPD Adviser on Organisation and Resourcing, is joint author (with Michael Armstrong) of Human Capital Management: Achieving Added Value through People, published by Kogan Page in February 2007. This describes how human capital management provides a bridge between human resource management and business strategy. It demonstrates how organisations can use the concepts of human resource management and the processes involved to enhance the value they obtain from people while continuing to meet their aspirations and needs.
- Managing People and Knowledge in Professional Service Firms, published in November 2006, develops the ideas brought out in previous reports from the University of Bath study to help you to understand how human capital is translated into organisational value.
- In June 2007 we published a short report based on a study which looked at investors’ views on the contribution of people to business, and setting out the implications for human capital evaluation.
- In May 2006 we published What’s the Future for Human Capital?, a collection of essays in which leading commentators in the field examine the nature of human capital, its evaluation, and the reporting of meaningful information to receptive audiences.
- Buy the report
- We established a panel of organisations who worked together to evaluate and report on human capital. We tracked their experiences and reported progress in a series of panel reports. The first of these was published in March 2006, the second in October 2006, and the third in July 2007.
- More information about the CIPD human capital panel
- View the first report from the panel
- View the second report from the panel
- View the third report from the panel
- We published a guide to assist with the reporting of human capital issues in January 2005. Human capital reporting: an internal perspective offers different organisations approaches to presenting the information in a useful way.
- View the guide
- We have responded to the Accounting for People Taskforce - the government strategy group looking at human capital.
- Read the response in the public policy pages.
- We have also conducted investigations into how human capital is reported externally in company reports and other medium. The change agenda, Human capital: external reporting framework, was published in June 2003.
- Read the paper
- To complement our work on people management and business performance, we commissioned Professor Harry Scarbrough and Dr Juanita Elias from Warwick Business School to research into the human capital practices in several companies. Evaluating Human Capital was published in October 2002. This is available to purchase online in our bookstore.
- Buy the report
- View the summary
People Management articles
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Sets out the principles of the external framework.
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A viewpoint article looking at how financial systems are inadequate for human capital reporting.
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A brief overview of the external reporting framework.
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Looks at the challenges facing companies in their desire to exploit human capital - with reference to the various stages Jamie Oliver went through in creating 'Jamie's kitchen'.
Please note that access to articles over one month old in the research centre is a member only benefit.
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