Our least important asset : why the relentless focus on finance and accounting is bad for business and employees /
"One of the biggest puzzles of the modern economy is why jobs have gotten worse in recent decades even as profits and share prices have steadily risen. The practices for managing employees--from hiring to training to employee involvement--have also declined in sophistication. Evidence that bett...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2023]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "One of the biggest puzzles of the modern economy is why jobs have gotten worse in recent decades even as profits and share prices have steadily risen. The practices for managing employees--from hiring to training to employee involvement--have also declined in sophistication. Evidence that better management of employees improves business outcomes has been ignored. The best explanation for this development begins with financial accounting, which sets out the rules that measure success for investors. As their influence has grown, the quirkiness of those rules with respect to human capital--for example, employees cannot be assets, and training them cannot be an investment--has distorted the way we manage employees in ways that make it inefficient for businesses as well as worse for employees. This development has been aided by a steady shift over the last generation in business leaders' views back to thinking about employee management through a 1930s' scientific management lens, and now data science principles in which the goal is to see employees primarily as a cost to minimize rather than a resource that should be maximized. Employment costs that financial accounting measures, mainly wages and salaries, are driven down at the expense of pushing up all other costs, such as turnover, lower productivity, and the use of nonemployee workers"--Publisher's description. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 0197629830 9780197629833 9780197629819 0197629814 9780197629826 0197629822 |