The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) have announced a major new strategic collaboration to foster closer working links between the finance and HR professions, helping to increase their combined impact on business performance. The work will include an early focus on transforming how organisations understand, measure and report on people data to drive business success.
By working together much more closely, the two bodies are seeking to send a strong message to the professions they represent about the importance of HR and finance working together in any organisation. Together, CIPD and CIMA will embark on a programme of joint research on areas such as ‘big data’, integrated business reporting and shared services for HR and finance. Critically, the professional bodies will also make their existing relevant training and continuous professional development (CPD) offers available to members of both organisations to boost knowledge development and understanding through learning.
One of the first shared projects the two bodies will embark on is a programme of research on human capital measurement. This is designed to address a shared concern that organisations are not consistently good at valuing the contribution of people to their performance and worth, or assessing the risks to business success that poor people management can bring. While financial information is a critical and recognised measure of a company’s value, the importance of people data is not fully understood by many businesses and is therefore overlooked, often to the detriment of longer-term thinking – something that CIMA and CIPD are striving to rectify.
Charles Tilley FCMA, CGMA, Chief Executive, CIMA, said: “When talking about property value, the adage often used is ‘location, location, location’. When thinking about the driver of any business, we should be saying it is ‘people, people, people’.”
“CIMA has long advocated that more emphasis should be placed on measuring the value of non-financial assets. We are delighted to be joining forces with CIPD to address what we both see as a critical issue for business. By working together, we hope to show that accurate and relevant reporting on an organisation’s people, as well as on its financials, provides real insight into the true health of the business, on which sound investment decisions can be made.”
Peter Cheese, Chief Executive, CIPD added: “We know that people are critical to business success. But you get what you measure, and many of the recent crises affecting business can be traced back to failures of culture that could have been picked up if longer-term people-related metrics had been given more weight instead of a myopic focus on short-term financial results. Our collaboration with CIMA will help us build hard metrics for what is often seen as the “soft” contribution people and culture make to organisational value. By working together on this and other critical challenges we intend to build stronger connections between the HR and finance functions – helping our respective members to build the knowledge and confidence to work together successfully.”
