What Talent Means In the Post-COVID-19 Workplace | World Economic Forum

COVID-19 continues to force companies to reimagine how they invest in human capital and measure the return. In light of this effort, last month, I shared a 36-page report by Willis Towers Watson and World Economic Forum–Human Capital as an Asset: An Accounting Framework to Reset the Value of Talent. The report offered seven principles for enabling an organization’s Board and management to track how their investment in people is augmenting the firm’s human capital and supporting the delivery of better outcomes for the business, the workforce, and the wider community. Attached here is a summarized version of the detailed report. In it, you will find the seven principles and a three-part framework that can help companies better understand how work and talent can create value in a post-COVID-19 workplace. The three parts include: 1) Assess the employee experience  2) Determine the value generated by all sources of work. 3) Assess the value of the workforce. Regarding #2 (value of work generated by all sources of work), organizations can apply this concept by “capturing the cost and productivity of all types of talent (e.g., employees, gig, outsourced) and automation on a like-for-like basis and using the resulting output to measure the value gained or The Return on Work.” Organizations can use the principles and framework to articulate ROI in human capital, just as it does on financial capital.