Spend On Human Capital Higher Than Perceptions Article

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Spend on human capital higher than perceptions

Author: Ceridian

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Spend on human capital is viewed as requiring either similar or higher investments than other company assets. This is one of the key findings of an in-depth survey by the FT Research Centre on behalf of Ceridian, one of the largest providers of human resource services in the world. The interviews were conducted with 50 financial and human resource directors of medium and large UK companies.

Most respondents felt that financial directors viewed either the workforce as requiring similar levels of investment to other company assets (50 per cent) or more investment as the most important asset to the business (40 per cent). Interestingly, half of the financial directors stated their people were their most important asset. By contrast, only six HR directors felt their financial director held this position and three HR directors actually stated they tried to keep people costs down as much as possible, a view not held by a single financial director.

Almost half of respondents (46 per cent) considered investment in HR, excluding wages, similar to that in other departments in their company and 16 per cent thought more. However, 30 per cent felt investment in HR was actually less.

Penny de Valk, strategy director at Ceridian in the UK, commented: "Our survey clearly showed that developing and implementing people initiatives in response to business strategy was the single most important deliverable expected of the HR team. Financial directors are much more interested in the effectiveness of people rather than pure efficiencies, in terms of accurate delivery of employee services or reduction of people costs. The overall response of financial directors to the whole issue of human capital has been more positive than might have been expected, demonstrating that human capital is indeed the most important issue on the corporate agenda and growing."

The research was conducted on behalf of Ceridian by the Financial Times Research Centre. It conducted 50 interviews with 27 financial directors/CFOs and 23 HR directors from a representative distribution of UK companies across different sectors and employment bands, ranging from 500 to over 4,000 employees.

For the purposes of the Ceridian survey, human capital was defined as the value of an organization people in respect of their collective skills, experience, potential and capacity.

About Author

Ceridian provides HR, payroll, EAP and HR consultancy services to over 50% of the Financial Times Global 500 and more than 75% of the Fortune 500. In the UK, Ceridian serves 9,600 customers with a headcount of over 1.7m and processes 24m payslips a year. It is the largest payroll provider overall, and the second largest outsourced payroll processor in terms of revenue, with over 70 years' experience in payroll in the USA and 40 years in the UK. http://www.ceridian.co.uk/ .

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Spend on human capital higher than perceptions