Human Capital Moneyball: a New Way to Value the Financial Impact of Employees
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Episode 167 Transcript:
Chris Curran: Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper, episode 167, Human Capital Moneyball: A New Way to Value the Financial Impact of Employees. This episode is brought to you by Business Advancement, Inc. enabling successful leaders and companies to accelerate to their next level of success. On the web at businessadvance.com.
And now, here’s Pam and Scott.
Pam Harper: Thanks, Chris. I’m Pam Harper, founding partner and CEO of Business Advancement, Inc., and sitting right across from me, as always, is my business partner and husband, Scott Harper. Hi, Scott.
Scott Harper: Hi, Pam. It’s great to join you again for another episode of Growth Igniters Radio. And, as always, our purpose is to spark new insights, inspiration, and immediately useful ideas for visionary leaders to accelerate themselves and their companies to their next level of game-changing innovation, growth, and success.
Scott Harper: Now, Pam, we’re looking ahead to 2020, and many top leadership teams are facing a paradox. On one hand, they recognize that they are dependent, as we all are, upon the right talent, or human capital, to drive business growth, whether it’s organic or acquisition, however it happens. Yet, as everyone intuitively recognizes how valuable employees are, it has frequently been difficult to actually quantify their financial impact.
Pam Harper: That’s right. And this paradox has led to many debates in C-suites and boardrooms about whether initiatives that improve human capital management are a nice-to-do or a must-do.
Of course, we strongly believe that initiatives that improve management of human capital are a must-do, provided that it’s been in a way that indicates which initiatives will be most likely to positively impact the outcomes that a company needs.
Scott Harper: That’s right. And now, it’s getting easier to do that because there is a research-based approach that actually helps quantify the financial impact of employees.
Pam Harper: And our guest today is going to share this with us. She is Dr. Solange Charas, founder and CEO of HC Moneyball, which provides human capital analytics for use in quantifying and optimizing the return on human capital investments. HC Moneyball is her brainchild, resulting from 25 years of providing human capital analytics to her C-suite clients to quantify and optimize their ROI on human capital investments and ultimately, to align human resource programs with business strategy.
Pam Harper: She currently serves as an adjunct professor in the MBA programs at Columbia, USC, and NYU, and is a distinguished principal research fellow at The Conference Board. Solange also works with the investing community, pre- and post-acquisition and investment, to understand the drivers of economic value creation attributed to human capital and to understand the inherent value of the people side of the target. She’s been published or cited in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, BestCompany, and Business Week. You can read much more about Solange’s experience, education, media appearances, and publications by going to Growth Igniters Radio, episode 167.
Pam Harper: Solange, welcome to Growth Igniters Radio.
Solange Charas: Hi, Pam and Scott. I’m so delighted to be spending some time with you today.
Pam Harper: Let’s start out at a very high level. How would you describe HC Moneyball?
Solange Charas: Well, I think HC Moneyball is actually two things. First, it’s a philosophy about how to use data and data analytics to enhance or optimize management decision about human capital investments and how to really optimize employees, employee engagement, employee productivity, all things that really impact bottom-line performance.
Solange Charas: The second thing is HC Moneyball is actually a product. It’s a product that we’ve created. It’s a SaaS platform that companies can subscribe to. They get the benefit of a technology where they basically just upload existing human capital and financial data into the platform, and it instantly transforms the data into metrics and ratios that the user can drag and drop into graphs and that they can visually understand the relationship between people and human capital performance and financial performance.
Pam Harper: This is exactly what we are talking about, which is quantifying the financial contribution of employees. What led you to research and develop this very unique approach?
Solange Charas: Well, I like to say, or I hope to say one day that I was a 25-year overnight success, by the way. I’ve actually been applying an analytics approach to my human capital consulting. We haven’t called it human capital. We call it human resources consulting. But I’ve been working in the space for over 25 years, and the concepts of quantifying human capital has been around for that long. In fact, it was at Arthur Andersen with a team of people that I respected greatly. We came up with this idea of applying a rigor that’s used in accounting and finance to the area of human capital. And we actually wrote a book about it called Delivering On the Promise. The idea has really been around for more than 25 years, and it’s the way that I approach all of my consulting assignments with clients is to bring this data analytics, this rigor of moving from I believe to I can prove to my clients around enhancing their management of human capital in the organization.
Scott Harper: That’s terrific. And, of course, Moneyball reminds us of Michael Lewis’ book about how the Oakland Athletics applied analytics to baseball, so you’re obviously drawing a parallel there.
Solange Charas: Absolutely.
Scott Harper: Now why should top leadership teams care about this approach, especially when we’re looking forward to 2020 and beyond?
Solange Charas: I think there are three big reasons why leadership should care about this. When I talk about leadership, I don’t necessarily mean just mid- or senior-level management. I think that boards should also be thinking about this as a goal this year.
Pam Harper: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. When we talk about top leadership, just to be clear here, we’re always talking about boards as well as C-suite.
Scott Harper: Yeah. And they should be on the same page.
Solange Charas: Yeah, you would hope.
Solange Charas: The three big reasons are transparency and disclosure, and I can get into more detail, if you want, but it’s transparency and disclosure; an alignment to the new purpose of the corporation that was defined by the Business Roundtable. The third is the world is changing really quickly, and if we’re not understanding our single largest line-item expense or our biggest asset, how are we possibly going to be agile and flexible in our organizations in a very quickly changing world?
Pam Harper: I agree with you there, especially when you’re talking about the fact that more and more companies consist of knowledge workers.
Solange Charas: Absolutely.
Pam Harper: Human capital becomes extremely important there. Now you mentioned something about transparency?
Solange Charas: Yeah. There are a bunch of governance-oriented agencies, like the SEC. Let’s take them for example, and ISO, the International Standards Organization.
Scott Harper: Right.
Solange Charas: And there are about 12 to 15 governance-related organizations that have been turning their attention to understanding how human capital or how people in the organization are actually impacting corporate financial performance. All these organizations are basically aligned in their belief, their emerging belief, that human capital is now material. It has a material impact to the organization.
Scott Harper: 100%. Yeah.
Solange Charas: As we understand that human capital investments and the way human capital performs has a material impact, the SEC specifically is asking for more transparency and more disclosures about human capital in the organization.
Pam Harper: Makes sense.
Solange Charas: The interesting thing is right now, the only thing that public companies have to disclose in any of their filings with the SEC is the total number of employees in the organization. That’s it, what’s your head count? And for the investing community, it’s not sufficient to understand just how many people work in the company. We need to understand how those people are performing, and so there’s this call now for disclosure around human capital performance. The ISO, the International Standards Organization, earlier this year released a new standard, and the standard number is 30414, and I think the title of that standard is Human Capital Governance Disclosure. Don’t quote me on that, but it’s something like that.
Pam Harper: Okay.
Solange Charas: And they’ve actually set down the algorithms for calculating human capital performance in the organization. The nice thing is, is that ISO didn’t actually make these up. They’ve looked at 40 years of research to come up with what has been studied and has been shown to be correlated to corporate financial performance. They’ve basically codified these algorithms to help organizations understand how well they are performing around the human capital area.
Solange Charas: And it goes from high level, like financial impact, all the way down to operating efficiencies, like safety. Right? How safe is your organization?
Pam Harper: Right.
Solange Charas: And things like diversity, how diverse is your organization? Attrition and retention. They’ve actually codified some of these measures that the investors want to know about, because if you have high attrition, high turnover, that’s very expensive. If you have low safety performance, that’s very expensive. And all of these things help to inform investors whether or not your company can achieve corporate financial performance, not just today, but sustainable. Sustainability is the new sort of watchword in the corporate world.
Pam Harper: Absolutely. Now, Solange, just to clarify, because we have many listeners who head up private companies, this is important whether or not you’re a public company. It’s important for private companies, too. I just want to emphasize that. Correct?
Solange Charas: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because this is a governance issue.
Pam Harper: Right.
Solange Charas: This is how well is the corporation being managed?
Pam Harper: Okay.
Solange Charas: And these are indicators. So, if you sit in a boardroom and you have board meetings, you will spend a lot of time going through the financials of the organization almost on a line-by-line basis.
Having been a public company board member, I know this. We spend a lot of time just going details through the financial statements of the organization and looking at performance against expectation, performance against budget. And we look at every input into the business model, except for the people issue-
Pam Harper: [crosstalk 00:12:38].
Solange Charas: … and that’s where we kind of fall down. And we don’t look at productivity, and we don’t look at attrition, and we don’t look at mobility and we don’t look at time to fill, I mean, basic metrics that are having material impact on the company.
Pam Harper: Right. Solange, this is really a game-changer, and so it does make a lot of sense. Before we go to break, I want to ask about what are ways that a top leadership team could use HC Moneyball as they’re leading for their companies growth? Due diligence is a piece of this as well. Right?
Solange Charas: Absolutely. Due diligence has typically been associated with a transaction, a merger and acquisition, but I would like to propose or just suggest that due diligence doesn’t necessarily have to be associated with a transaction. It is a good audit function, especially if we want to create some baseline measures for existing organizations. You can do a due diligence, because due diligence is really assessing risk. And why wouldn’t we want to assess the risk associated with our human capital as a way of understanding or creating a road map for moving forward?
Solange Charas: There are lots of ways that a leadership team cam use HC Moneyball. If they don’t want to use my platform, they can certainly adopt some of the discipline or the rigor around it. And the fundamental idea is enhance your understanding.
Pam Harper: That’s right.
Solange Charas: And one of my bugaboos … I grew up in the era of best practice. I was at Arthur Andersen when best practices were actually sort of emerging, and Arthur Andersen created this entire database of corporate best practices. And I moved away from the concept of best practice because what works for one company might not necessarily work for another.
Scott Harper: It’s certainly seen that way.
Solange Charas: I like to think about it as best evidence. What evidence do I have within my organization that’s helping me make the best decisions for all the constituents now that are part of the Business Roundtable, my customers, my employees, my vendors, my community, and, of course, my shareholder.
Scott Harper: We’re singing from the same song there.
Pam Harper: Absolutely. We are going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll get deeper with Dr. Solange Charas, founder and CEO of HC Moneyball, into HC Moneyball and emerging trends in due diligence. Stay with us.
Scott Harper: This is Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper, brought to you by Business Advancement, Inc. We focus on enabling visionary leaders to ignite, sustain, and boost momentum for game-changing results. We’re on the web at businessadvance.com.
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Pam Harper: Welcome back to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper, that’s me, and Scott Harper. Today, we’ve been speaking with Dr. Solange Charas, founder and CEO of HC Moneyball, about Human Capital Moneyball and new ways to establish the value and ROI of human capital.
Pam Harper: Solange, how can people find out more about your company and you?
Solange Charas: Well, they can visit our website at hcmoneyball.com. And if they’re interested in learning more about how the approach and the solution can help them, they can click on the link and make an appointment and speak to any one of the number of people that are helping us promote this concept in the marketplace.
Pam Harper: That’s great. And you can see Solange’s full bio and other resources for this conversation by going to growthignitersradio.com episode 167.
Pam Harper: Let’s get back to our conversation. We were talking about the importance of this approach. And what types of HR programs have you found to have a measurable impact on corporate financial outcomes?
Solange Charas: I’m so happy you asked. It’s my personal observation, and not coincidentally supported by about 40 years of academic research, that there are three big, chunky areas that link HR to corporate financial outcomes. These three areas have actually been really well documented in literature. Probably the best summary article is from two researchers at Harvard named Beeferman and Bernstein. Great names, right? And they did what’s called a meta analysis where they looked at a whole bunch of research over the 40 years to see how other researchers have concluded this relationship, and, in fact, what they’ve concluded is that HR is material. It does have a material impact. This is not a surprise to us. We know this intuitively. Right?
Scott Harper: Right.
Solange Charas: But they’ve actually been able to find enough evidence in other people’s research to make that conclusion.
Solange Charas: The three big areas that they talk about, that they looked at, the first one is work systems, and that makes sense. What are your policies and what are your practices around the way that you treat people? Some of the things that we can look at there is tenure, employee engagement, employee involvement in decisions. And this is really all about the employee experience and what are organizations doing to enhance that employee experience.
Solange Charas: And that becomes a little tricky when we have a lot of changes in the demographics. For example, I’m a baby boomer, and when I started working, I had a different point of view about what my relationship should be like with my employer. And back then in the, I don’t want to age myself too much, but in the ’80s and ’90s, it was really a contract. An employer would pay me to do a job. I would do that job, and if I did it well, they’d give me a bonus and they’d give me a promotion and from time to time, they would invest training and development in me. And it was really a contract. You pay me to do a job.
Solange Charas: But with the millennials now comprising almost 54% of the workforce, they have a different point of view about the employer-employee relationship. And we, in terms of management and governance, need to really understand what will engage the employee in that demographic group. And what’s interesting is that the millennials are very socially oriented, and they believe in social good and they believe in having purpose and impact.
Solange Charas: And I think that that’s why we’re seeing organizations like the SEC and ISO and the Business Roundtable really adopt this concept of environmental social governance, ERG, and the corporate social responsibility, CSR, and I think it’s really driven because of this workforce focus, that employees really want to feel that their work has purpose and has an impact.
Pam Harper: Yeah.
Solange Charas: Now, the organization is sort of coming around to that, and we’re seeing employee activists on the rise. Just this morning was a news item about a group of employees at Facebook that are pushing back on Facebook’s policy to not vet or check the reliability or the accuracy of these political ads. And a group of employees from the inside are saying, “That’s not right. We have to make a difference and make sure that we’re not lying.” I think 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have seen employee activism.
Pam Harper: Not the same way.
Solange Charas: Same way. Right.
Pam Harper: I would say that over the years that I’ve been working with employee groups, people have cared about purpose, even boomers and older people than that. But it’s different in terms of the way you’re talking about it. Everybody didn’t just rise up and take an action. That is different. One of the things I wanted to ask, engagement is a fuzzy word.
Solange Charas: Right.
Pam Harper: That has been something that a lot of people dispute. One person says, “Well, engagement means this,” and it’s very hard. HC Moneyball actually defines this, right?
Solange Charas: Well, that’s a very interesting question. The one thing that HC Moneyball doesn’t do is employee surveys.
Solange Charas: Well, our philosophy is we don’t want to disrupt the organization. We don’t want to create any event in the organization that’s going to take employees’ eyes off the ball or management’s eyes off the ball.
Pam Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Solange Charas: And what we believe is that we can measure engagement through things that we can observe instead of asking people to give us their opinion about that [crosstalk 00:22:28].
Pam Harper: All right. What would be just one example? I agree with you 100% that people can say anything
Scott Harper: What can you observe that you can turn into a protection of value?
Solange Charas: Exactly. What we can observe is attrition, people leaving the organization.
Pam Harper: Okay. Okay.
Solange Charas: Sometimes people leave at certain times of the year or they leave certain managers at a higher rate than others, so we can understand what the driver of attrition is. We can look at retention, the tenure of employees. That’s an indication of whether or not they’re engaged. During the Recession, people weren’t leaving their companies because they couldn’t find a new job, but in today’s economy, people can find jobs. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics just issued some information about the fact that for the first time in decades, there are actually more jobs than workers in the economy.
Solange Charas: I think it’s at every level of the economy, both at the knowledge worker sophisticated level and also at the retail side where people can find jobs, working in coffee shops or working in retail. So, for the first time in decades, we actually have more jobs than workers in the economy to take them. You don’t stay in a company that you don’t like, that you don’t feel engaged because you’re afraid of not finding a job. And, in fact, Gallup does polls every year, and they find that 60% of employees feel that they’re not engaged. That’s just a statistic.
Pam Harper: And that’s an opinion, too.
Solange Charas: And that’s an opinion. How do we measure that in the organization?
Pam Harper: That’s true. Also, just clarifying, Solange, because we have a global listenership, some of the things we’re talking about, full economy, full employment and all of that, but HC Moneyball could be applied really anywhere in the world. Correct?
Solange Charas: Anywhere.
Scott Harper: Yeah.
Solange Charas: Anywhere in the world. Anywhere that there are employees, we can measure their impact and we can measure the efficiencies and the effectiveness of human capital programs through HC Moneyball.
Scott Harper: Okay. Building on that, Solange, let’s shift gears just a little bit and talk about how this approach can be applied to valuing a company, say, an acquisition target or they’re doing M&A. How can leadership teams use HC Moneyball to assess what a potential target or partner is doing in terms of their HR programs to effect operating efficiencies, for instance.
Solange Charas: This is a really interesting area. The traditional human resources due diligence doesn’t really fully capture the intangible of human capital.
Scott Harper: Right.
Solange Charas: A traditional approach really looks at the level of cost or expense associated with HR programs, and then it sort of ties it back to the accounting discipline. Right?
Solange Charas: Somebody will say, “Oh, we spend $3 million on payroll.” And then somebody will say, “Oh, yeah, that kicks back to our payroll.” But it doesn’t tell you anything about the health of the human capital. I’d like to think of it as the traditional approach is like a balance sheet. You just basically take a snapshot in time of the organization.
Solange Charas: What we like to do using an HC Moneyball approach is actually look at the health of the human capital of the organization like an income statement, your sources and uses of the human capital to create financial outcomes. Typically, the focus of a due diligence, of a financial due diligence is what they call Q of E, or quality of earnings. You want to understand whether or not a company that you’re buying has healthy earnings.
Scott Harper: Right.
Solange Charas: And what we do with HC Moneyball is we actually look at the Q of EE, the quality of the employees that you’re buying.
Scott Harper: Yep.
Solange Charas: We look at human capital performance over time, and we relate that to the corporate financial performance over time. We calculate things like human capital ROI. Are you getting a positive return on investment on every dollar that you spend on employees? And does that trend upward? Are you getting a higher return on investment in human capital over time? We look at productivity over time. We look at retention and attrition over time. We look at diversity and management stability. And, most importantly, we benchmark this to a proxy of like or competitor companies so that the acquirer can say, “Oh, we have good human capital,” but is it competitive to others in the marketplace? So, we do two things. We look at it internally and then we look at it comparatively.
Pam Harper: What do you do then if a company is “unique?” There are companies out there that are startups, that are, say, the next Facebook or whatever. They didn’t exist before, but there are a lot of companies that are buying technology-related companies.
Scott Harper: And they have human capital.
Pam Harper: Yeah.
Scott Harper: But there’s not necessarily a long track record.
Pam Harper: Could you still do it?
Solange Charas: Yeah, absolutely. Because what we’re doing for startup companies is we’re actually looking at their three-year financial projection, and we’re helping companies understand whether or not the human capital that they planned for, that they either have today as a startup or that they planned for in their growth is sufficient to support a sustainable corporate financial expectation.
Pam Harper: Building on this, I understand that HC Moneyball could also help you with post-acquisition integration strategy. Right?
Solange Charas: Exactly. It’s funny that you ask, because just this last week, I was on a panel at the ACG M&A East Conference in Philadelphia, and it was specifically on this topic of the first hundred days post-acquisition.
Pam Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Solange Charas: And what I found interesting was I was on a panel with financial transactors, partners in PE firms and transaction advisory support people, professionals in this area. We had PE people who were investors, and their transaction advisory support person that was on the panel was focused solely on systems integration, so all systems in the organization. And all they talked about was human capital. That’s all they were interested in in the first hundred days was how do we get people focused, on board, integrated?
Pam Harper: Yes, of course.
Scott Harper: Huge impact.
Solange Charas: Huge impact. And what I found was equally amusing is that they were doing it the old-fashioned way.
Scott Harper: Okay.
Pam Harper: Oh. Well, they didn’t know about you. Well, they did.
Solange Charas: Well, now they do. Really the dedicated HR professional on the panel, and I wasn’t talking about doing HR the way they do it because they do it at a very subjective level. And I said, “I don’t do it at subjective level. I gather a lot of data. I use data rigor. I use what the evidence tell me what’s right, and then I help plan the first hundred days based on analytics, on data analytics. And the long and the short of it is, is, yes, there’s a value in using subjective evaluation and using judgment and experience to really contextualize what you’re seeing in an organization, but it needs to be backed up with data, because everyone has an opinion, that your opinions are valid when they’re proved out by the data that’s there. To make an organization or to make an acquisition successful, we really do need to focus on the first hundred days.
Solange Charas: Because what happens is people get distracted and their productivity dips, and the idea is to shorten the productivity trough as much as possible. And we need to address the three questions that most employees have in either the company that’s being acquired or the company where the integration where the target company’s being integrated into, which is, do I have a job? Who’s going to be my boss? And how are things going to change around here?
Solange Charas: And using data analytics to inform a strategy and a plan of action for the first hundred days helps address those questions, gets people back to work faster. And the first hundred days, as the panel was very adamant in saying, is really critical in the future success of that acquisition, because if you can’t get the first hundred days right, you lose all momentum.
Pam Harper: Absolutely.
Scott Harper: And the more that the analytics and the subjective judgment and experience jive, the more you know you’re on the right track or not.
Solange Charas: Yes, exactly.
Pam Harper: We’re going to take another quick break, and when we come back, Scott and I will speak more with Dr. Solange Charas, founder and CEO of HC Moneyball, about criteria a top leadership team, maybe yours, can use to decide if HC Moneyball is right for you. Stay with us.
Scott Harper: You are listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper, brought to you by Business Advancement, Inc. We’re on the web at businessadvance.com.
Pam Harper: We’ve been talking about the critical impact of human capital management on top and bottom line business today. With human interactions and behavior playing an even greater role in company performance, it’s more important than ever to ensure that all the moving parts of the organization come together for greatest value.
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Pam Harper: Welcome back to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. Over the last two segments, Scott and I have been speaking with Dr. Solange Charas about Human Capital Moneyball and new ways to establish the value and ROI of human capital.
Pam Harper: Solange, remind us again how people can find out about your company and you.
Solange Charas: They can go to www.hcmoneyball.com, and they’ll be able to find lots of information about HC Moneyball and what we’re doing. And they can click on an appointment setting interface, create an appointment or just call us. We’ve got a business number that’s listed there, and we’d be happy to speak to anybody that wants to learn more about the solution.
Pam Harper: And also remember that you can see Solange’s full bio and more about her background and other resources for this conversation by going to growthignitersradio.com episode 167 and scroll down under Resources.
Pam Harper: Solange, let’s talk about immediately useful next steps in this case having to do with how leaders can adapt the concepts of HC Moneyball to their own companies. The question on a lot of leadership teams’ minds at this point might be, could this be right for us? What would be criteria that a leadership team could discuss? What would be the first one?
Solange Charas: Probably the first and maybe the most important is do you want to improve your corporate financial performance?
Pam Harper: Okay.
Solange Charas: If your interested in improving your bottom line, you need to really understand how human capital, since it is material, is impacting your corporate financial performance.
Pam Harper: Okay.
Scott Harper: What’s another criteria that a company could look at to say, “Yeah, we could benefit from this approach”?
Solange Charas: I think if an organization has at least 100 employees, it’s an opportunity for them to optimize their investment in human capital. We use 100 employees sort of as a rule of thumb because this is a data-driven solution, and if you have fewer than 100 employees, the reliability of the analytics begins to deteriorate a little bit because everybody knows the bigger the end, the more reliable the analytics.
Scott Harper: Yeah. You lose statistical power if you go too small. Right.
Solange Charas: Exactly. Exactly. And we want the system to help management make informed decisions, so it’s really important for us that the data that they see in the platform is reliable. The other sort of rule of thumb is if your HR-oriented expense, that’s comp and benefits and anything that has to do with people, training and development, recruitment, anything that you spend on people is 50% or more of your total expense, then this is an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of your human capital investment because small incremental improvements in productivity or HC ROI or HC value add have very big impact on bottom-line performance because it is so leveraged.
Pam Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. What about a third criteria, Solange?
Solange Charas: I think probably the third criteria, and I don’t think we talked about this, but the platform is actually geared for a CFO or a financial analyst. We think that the way the platform works is very beneficial to them. We’re moving now into the human resources market, talking to heads of HR. But I think the third criteria would be if you want to know how your performance compares to competitors or public companies or segments of the public company market used as a proxy for your organization or your industry, both at the financial level like looking at revenue, income, expense, EBITDA, any of the financial ROS, ROA, ROE, if you’re a financial person and you’re not benchmarking, this platform will help you benchmark against those financial indicators in addition to helping you benchmark your human capital performance.
Solange Charas: We’ll look at HC value add, HC ROI amongst your competitor group to help you contextualize how your performance compares to the outside world. And it happens right in the platform, right there, drag and drops. You pick your competitor group. You customize your benchmark segment and it gets pulled right into the visual representations of your performance.
Pam Harper: So very easy to use in that way.
Solange Charas: Absolutely. Most mid-size, small-size companies don’t want to spend the money to benchmark. They know it’s important, but it’s very expensive, and in our solution, because we can leverage one dataset, which is the entire public company data, we can provide that at a extremely reasonable price because we buy it once and then we give access to our clients. We leverage it, in other words.
Scott Harper: Now, your going beyond feeling to and guessing and saying, “I think this is working” to “Hey, we have data. We can benchmark it against our competitors. It gives us a much stronger position to move forward, to make decisions, and maybe make changes if we have to.”
Pam Harper: And especially what I’m hearing and what I saw in some of your demonstrations is that you can focus in on exactly where those investments really are paying off and what you could do, what you can do as a team, as a company, as a leadership team to work across the company to improve the efficiencies but even more, the effectiveness.
Solange Charas: Absolutely. Our fundamental philosophy is we take data and we turn it into information. It’s hard to make decisions on data, but it’s a lot easier to make decisions when you have information. And that’s what the platform essentially does, is it transforms data into something that CFOs, CEOs, board directors, CHROs can actually use to inform decisions.
Pam Harper: That’s great. Well, Solange, we’re at the end of our episode here. Any final thoughts you’d like to leave us with regarding HC Moneyball and the importance of human capital management?
Solange Charas: This is 25 years in the making. I’m hoping that the time is right and with the SEC, ISO, the Business Roundtable, focus on ESG, CSR, activists both at the employee and the shareholder level, it’s time that we shine a light on human capital and the impact, the material impact of human capital. And we’re ready. We’ve got the technology. We’ve got the mindset. We’ve got the external forces making us pay attention to those, and hopefully, as I said, I’ll be a 25-year overnight success with this tool and this market offering.
Pam Harper: I think so. Well, Solange, thanks again for being our guest today.
Solange Charas: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Scott Harper: Yes. Thanks, Solange. And thanks to you out there for listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. To get show notes and resource links for this week’s episode, go to growthignitersradio.com, select episode 167.
Pam Harper: Until next time, this is Pam Harper.
Scott Harper: And Scott Harper.
Pam Harper: Wishing you continued success, and we leave with this question to discuss with your top leadership team.
Scott Harper: What are the most effective ways for our company to improve our human capital management systems and programs so that we can maximize the financial value of our employees?
