Barbara Adachi, a principal in Deloitte Consulting's human capital practice, started creating a stricter separation between vacation and work when she was in Patagonia on vacation several years ago.
"The flip side of flexibility is that many workers feel pressured — often by their peers — to be available anytime and anywhere," said Tracy Haugen, a director in Deloitte Consulting's human capital practice.
"It's very sad to come back to the same old, same old after spending three to five years learning more about the business and having your eyes opened to global issues," said Jane Malecki, executive director of the human capital practice at Ernst & Young.
Index providers, including Thomson Reuters, have developed products (the Diversity & Inclusion Index is one) that acknowledge both the demand for good human capital practices and their value-relevance.
In preparing for the 2019 proxy statement, companies may consider including additional supplemental disclosures that they believe will provide helpful context to investors, such as adding language to contextualize the pay of rank-and-file employees and more broadly discussing human capital practices.
Such solutions enable businesses to drive smarter human capital practices through each stage of sales development, from sales selection and onboarding, to goal management, to incentives and rewards.
Although some public discourse renounces diversity efforts as "politically correct," most large organizations are championing fundamental changes in their human capital practices so that people with a broader range of identities and perspectives will be recruited, paid equitably, and promoted to leadership roles.
Sabri Challah, the head of Deloitte's human-capital practice, says that companies are making great efforts to recruit (and retain) the youngest cohort of workers, the "Generation Y".
HUMAN CAPITAL IN PRACTICE Unlike financial capital, human capital cannot be monetized.
The Human Capital Management Coalition recently submitted a rule-making petition to the SEC to request that the Commission's required disclosures be extended to include decision-useful information on human capital "policies, practices, and performance".
That kind of tradition no longer works for Japan," said Arabaci, who appreciates that Nakanishi publicly announced his plans for Hitachi to revamp its human capital management practices.
