What are your people worth?
"PEOPLE ARE OUR MOST IMPORTANT ASSET." How many times have you heard that? More important, how many times upon hearing it have you nodded politely and then changed the subject to something more, ah, important? Human resources receives far more lip service than respect, but economic factors factors are making HR the subject of some truly substantive executive discussions-and expenditures.
Human resources as a lowly cost center
The Human resource department is traditionally inundated with excessive hard and soft costs. This single department is a necessary evil. HR is not part of any company's core line of business, which creates these hard and soft costs. These costs revolve around management of documents for each employee. If the career of an employee is broken up into 3 phases, HR's document lifecycle looks like the following: