The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) have announced they will work together to foster closer links between finance and HR professionals, to increase their combined effectiveness on business performance.
An early focus of the collaboration will focus on transforming how organisations understand, measure and report on people data to drive business success.
By working much more closely, the two bodies say they seek to send a strong message to the professions they represent about the importance of HR and finance working together in all organisations.
They will embark on a programme of joint research on areas such as ‘big data’, integrated business reporting and shared services for HR and finance. The bodies will also make their relevant training and continuous professional development (CPD) offers available to each other’s members.
One of their first shared projects is research into human capital measurement, designed to address concerns that organisations are inconsistent at "valuing the contribution of people to their performance and worth, or assessing the risks to business success that poor people management can bring".
In a joint statement the bodies said: "The importance of people data is not fully understood by many businesses and is therefore overlooked, often to the detriment of longer-term thinking".
CIMA chief executive Charles Tilley 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’".
