Humanizing Human Capital: Invest in Your People for Optimal Business Returns

The work world is changing faster than ever before. Adapting to this new reality without a significant interruption in results is increasingly a top priority for all businesses.

The key to thriving through disruption is understanding and practicing human capital strategies that will drive enterprise performance and value-creation.

In Humanizing Human Capital, renowned business thought leaders Solange Charas, PhD, and Stela Lupushor reframe traditional HR practices into a future-forward strategy to optimize human capital. Charas and Lupushor shift decision-making about people from a gut sense to an evidence-based approach—a critical and much-needed departure from the cross-your-fingers-and-hope-for-the-best approach of most traditional HR programs today.

Humanizing Human Capital reveals a step-by-step method to apply analytics approaches to human capital while anticipating inevitable changes in the workforce landscape. This will enable human capital professionals to generate positive outcomes for all stakeholders and allow management to make decisions that work for the entire enterprise.

With this book’s comparison of “traditional” with the “future-forward” approach to human capital management, case studies, real-world situations, and 20 business principles, you will learn to:

Adopt a best-evidence versus best-practice approach to decision making

Shift your thinking so that you view human capital as a crucial investment rather than as a sunk cost

Identify what needs to change to respond to future pressures and apply critical thinking to create workable solutions

Balance human capital analytics with the more human-centric elements of people management

Equip yourself with approaches and tools to interpret the collective voice of the workforce

Utilize methods to measure and optimize human capital efficiency, increasing your ROI

Increase value for all key stakeholders, including investors, management, workers, customers, partners, and the community at large

The road ahead may seem unpredictable and even treacherous, but Humanizing Human Capital provides leaders of any organization a new framework to create resilient, responsive, and innovative organizations with tangible and sustainable business results.

Solange Charas focuses on how to optimize the impact of human capital from a brand and financial perspective. Solange is a Distinguished Principal Research Fellow at the Conference Board, and is a Faculty member at Columbia, USC, and NYU, teaching in their Masters of Human Capital Management programs. Previously, Solange served on public company boards and was the CHRO for three global organizations.

Stela Lupushor works with the Conference Board’s Fortune 500 corporations-members on rethinking their workplace strategies. She leads Reframe.Work Inc., consulting on how to create inclusive workplaces through the use of design thinking, technology and analytics, as well as amazing.community, a nonprofit expanding the work horizon for women 45+.