Ashish Kothari asks why employees show up only as costs, never as assets. The answer: calculate skills-based ROI using data companies already have, then reframe it to show the financial return on investing in people. A formula to make human capital visible on the balance sheet.
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I think this is one of the core issues that has plagued this field for so long, that people cost show up in the income statement, they actually don't show up on the balance sheet. And so I'm quite intrigued by this idea of quantifying and putting as people assets on the balance sheet. Talk to me a little bit about how you would go about doing that. Like how do you actually quantify and put that on the balance sheet?
So we've given this a lot of thought. So, you know, the place where we've started is where companies already look at value from HR or talent decisions and programs and so on. So it's looking at the key measures that companies are already recording, but looking at them through a skills lens. So if you think about ROI as the value gained from your skills investment minus the cost of that investment, you know, times 100 divided by your cost of investment, just to sort of level what we're looking at. There are so many elements that can actually shine a light on the value you've gained from investing in skills.