HUMAN CAPITAL AS AN ASSET: PAGE 31 AN ACCOUNTING FRAMEWORK FOR THE NEW WORLD OF WORK INCORPORATING THE FRAMEWORK INTO BUSINESS DECISION-MAKING At the same time, chief human resources officers have become even more influential in business decision-making as a result of the crisis, given that in a pandemic companies’ workforce approach has been pivotal to the business response. As The Economist noted early in the crisis, “in a pandemic, a chief people officer can make or break a company”. CHROs have typically been on the core crisis response leadership team. This consolidates the growing role that they have taken in the C-suite in recent years as the importance that companies attach to their people strategies has grown, and it offers a good opportunity to bring relevant human capital metrics to the table. These can be deployed to help govern and measure business performance and can serve as a basis for incentive programmes. Enterprises, boards, CHROs and other supporters of human capital accounting need to ride the momentum of the crisis and communicate incentive changes along with risks and rewards to shareholders and key stakeholders Had more companies made more human-centric decisions during the pandemic using a framework for human capital accounting such as the one proposed, their actions would have combined to deliver better social, economic and business outcomes. The rise in unemployment would have been smaller, governments would not have needed to provide such significant incentives to encourage companies not to lay off staff, the costs for the public sector and taxpayer would have been reduced and consumer spending would have experienced less of a hit, in turn benefitting companies’ revenues. The principles-based accounting framework for human capital set out in this paper can serve as a guidepost for companies to create value for the business. We hope that human capital accounting will gain the same prominence as financial, physical and intellectual capital accounting. Once companies incorporate such frameworks into their enterprise-wide decision-making, they will be better equipped to do what is right for employees and society as well as business and move human capital to the asset side of the balance sheet.