In December 2021, Allianz was certified as one of the first organizations worldwide, under the ISO 30414 Human Capital Reporting Standard via the disclosure of key workforce metrics in the Allianz People Fact Book and the HR pages within the Sustainability report.

ISO 30414, Guidelines for internal and external human capital reporting, is the first International Standard that allows an organization to get a clear view of the actual contribution of its human capital. Applicable to enterprises of all types and sizes, it provides guidelines on core HR areas such as organizational culture, recruitment and turnover, productivity, health and safety, and leadership.

The impact of information asymmetry is alive and well in 2022 and has found a new application: human capital. Disclosures about human capital performance will become an organisation’s competitive advantage by creating a stronger employer brand, which is attractive to candidates and fills open jobs, and with workers more likely to stay with organisations longer.

The IIRC (International Integrated Reporting Council) and SASB (Sustainability Accounting Standards Board) have created the Value Reporting Foundation. This foundation has published an Integrated Reporting framework that calls for the adoption of six capitals. One of these is human capital. In this article, read how human capital is a key creator of other capitals within an organization. Highlighted in the article is the need for enhanced human capital reporting to understand organizational resilience and sustainability. Foundational guidelines within ISO30414 provide structure and discipline for human capital reporting measurements.

The SEC is now requiring that US public companies disclose information about human capital management “to the extent such disclosures would be material to an understanding of the registrant’s business”—such disclosure is no longer voluntary. Boards will need to determine whether human capital is material, what they need to disclose, how to contextualize human capital performance, and how they should communicate this to the investor community.

In February 2020, The Conference Board embarked on a research project to understand how human capital analytics (HCA) affects the worker experience and how companies use HCA. We had no idea how COVID-19 would affect our research but quickly decided to use the results from this prepandemic survey as a baseline to understand how this disruptive event would change how organizations thought of and used data. Nine months later, we conducted a slightly modified survey to measure how COVID-19 changed the way organizations think about workplace experience and HCA.