【正文】 s the only petitive advantage that a pany possesses. Employee behavior, the knowledge and experience they bring, together with their mitment to the organization are key drivers for sustainability and growth.Squeezing savings in the supply chain, ensuring higher capacity utilization at the shop floor, continuously upgrading the product and delighting customers with efficient service models are all efforts that are steered by employees. Every business needs workers who take ownership of their work and the workplace. They need to be bargain buyers, effective salespeople, have unfaltering faith in their products, zealously guard their customers, painstakingly track the petition and above all, have an unpromising mitment, loyalty and honesty towards the organization and its stakeholders.To survive, sustain and grow in this context, where employee excellence is required more than ever before to achieve sustainable growth, the role of the corporation has been changing too. The old systems of training, monitoring and awarding employees are inadequate. The sheer size of businesses deems that impractical. Businesses now need to focus on attracting, retaining and harnessing the best talent in a more holistic and strategic manner.To be successful in all this, panies need to measure the value that employees bring to the organization, evaluate their impact on business performance and then align them with the business results. Companies have always measured their investments in more tangible assets such as buildings, equipment and even new products. Yet, many still pay less attention to their employees. Companies continue to focus on physical assets that were crucial historically or whose productivity is easily measurable financially.“What gets measured gets done” may have described the dynamics of the factory floor but did not have much to do with the human resource department. Moreover, measuring the “soft stuff” or the human capital has been difficult if not impossible. That is, till now.Considerable evidence already exists, both in academic research and in work done by Hewitt Associates, that successful panies know the value that people can bring to the organization, invest appropriately in their talent and measure the impact their investment has on the bottom line. The notion of the employeecustomer value chain was first made broadly popular in the January 1998 issue of the Harvard Business Review, which detailed a value driver model at Sears in the United States. (See Figure 1.)Today many similar models exist in organisations around the world. Hewitt’s Best Employer studies have shown that these panies have higher revenue growth and greater profitability than other organizations. These numbers vary considerably across regions but what is mon and consistent is better business performance.These organizations create an environment that enables employee engagement, capturing the hearts and minds of employees to deliver extraordinary performance. An engaged employee is one who consistently speaks positively about the organization, stays with the organization despite opportunities to work elsewhere and exerts extra effort in work and behavior that contributes to business success. Hewitt’s Best Employer studies, for example, clearly demonstrate that The Best have much higher employee engagement (73% vs. 52%) and lower turnover (10% vs. 15%) on an average. This global research has conclusively established the high correlation between employee engagement and business performance gauged through key business measures. It has shown that organizations that improved the employee engagement levels simultaneously produced rises in productivity, employee retention, customer satisfaction, total shareholder return (TSR) and sales growth. Using a database of over 100 public corporations that pleted an engagement study over a fiveyear period, Hewitt Associates has demonstrated the following:178。178。Simple, linear causal relationship between andlooking indicatorsrules Benchmarking focuses on what others are doing and can inhibit outsidethebox thinking or refocus on new people strategies. Building HR ScorecardsThe HR Balanced Scorecard is an effective tool to illustrate the contribution of HR to achieving longterm value generation. It is based on the business measurement framework provided by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton. Besides providing a framework for measuring the effectiveness of HR strategy, a Hewitt HR scorecard serves as a munication and planning tool.The scorecard ensures alignment of HR strategy with overall business strategy, focuses HR initiatives on meeting strategic goals, and evaluates the impact of diverse HR activities on an organization’s longterm business objectives. A Hewitt HR scorecard uses four ponents to define and measure the effectiveness of peoplemanagement activities and how they contribute to longterm value creation for an organization:Financial: This area of the scorecard focuses on the shorterterm financial impact of people management and HR practices on business results.Customer: This area of the scorecard focuses on the perceptions key stakeholders have about HR effectiveness and peoplemanagement programs, such as customer satisfaction and retention.Operational: This area of the scorecard focuses on the internal efficiencies of critical HR processes — for example, productivity, quality, cost, and cycle time.Strategic Capability: This area of the scorecard takes a broader view of the development of critical people capabilities that can help the organization achieve and maintain petitive success.Details on this topic can be found in the People Scorecards article.Human Capital ModellingHuman Capital Modelling (HCM) is a more sophisticated approach to determining the impact of your employees on business performance, guiding potential investment decisions, focusing your strategic planning and measuring the return on your investmen