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Can People be Considered Assets?

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When hearing the word asset, a lot of things can come into our minds. The first thought would be something valuable, something precious to us, to our home, to our company or to our business.

Something valuable can be an item, thing or entity, which condition and performance has an impact to our organization objectives and service delivery process. The value again can be diverse and delete vary between different organizations, type of business, stakeholders, etc.

Something valuable to a company could be physical devices that are used for different purposes. Valuable could be considered also the employees that work in a company. Their knowledge, career, attitude could be considered as a value for a company. Reputation of company, the methods how it secures its important information, etc., receivable accounts such as bonds and stocks have a very important value to the company.

A general differentiation between valuable things and assets, is that the former can be tangible or intangible, financial or non-financial. However, various differences in business world and also in general whole society result in different points of view regarding what is considered an asset, which results in a lot of disputes as well.

One of the most common and very important assets, which are usually surrounded by discussions on whether or not they should be considered assets, are human beings.

A human being or a person cannot be considered an asset like tangible fixed assets such as equipment, because people cannot be owned, controlled or measured for future economic benefits in money terms, unlike physical assets.

However, the maintenance of physical assets, their condition and the value that will be taken from them depends all on people who will have to make decisions for them and have to put physical assets to work.

Just imagine if a company would lose an asset such as reputation, lose some income, what would happen if a company loses its employees, who would be able even to work for better reputation or better to say who would be able to even do business with the remaining reputation. On a social level, it is hard to name a human being as an asset which is owned by an organization, as an object of production, or to be expressed in financial terms. But there is nothing wrong if its knowledge, work, commitment, or general values are measured, enhanced and maintained because, at the end of the day, thanks to these values companies benefit from and convert them to money.

The enormous GDP growth from intangible assets in comparison with tangible assets, is another fact that proves the importance of person’s trainings, developments, knowledge and engagements, which would produce future values and financial revenues for an organization.

As a conclusion, what is the answer of whether people are considered assets depends on what is consider valuable and what has an impact on organization objectives, and of course potentials to bring benefits in the future.

However, more important topic than this is that to manage them or to get the best values from them, the complex processes of asset management should be included and a demanded for accountability for results or ways to measure the values of the people investments would be very useful.

There are already different systems, methods, software, and standards which are used to manage different types of assets. It is up to companies what to consider an asset and what to include in asset portfolio. Sometimes assets are managed as a group, rather than as individual. Such groupings of assets may be by asset types, asset systems, or asset portfolios.

One of the newest standards for managing asset is ISO 55001 Asset Management. According to ISO 55001, this new standard leaves an open topic to organizations to determine what to consider asset, so ISO 55001 specifies the requirements for the establishment, implementation, maintenance and improvement of a management system for asset management, referred to as an “asset management system”.

Professional Evaluation and Certification Board (PECB) is a certification body for persons on a wide range of professional standards. Soon it will offer ISO 55001 as well. For now PECB already offers training and certification services for professionals wanting to support organizations on the implementation of these management systems. ISO Standards and Professional Trainings offered by PECB:

• Certified Lead Implementer (5 days)• Certified Lead Auditor (5 days)• Certified Foundation (2 days)• ISO Introduction (1 day)

Lead Auditor, Lead Implementer and Master are certification schemes accredited by ANSI ISO/IEC 17024.

Rreze Halili is the Technology, Security and Continuity (TSC) Product Manager at PECB. She is in charge of developing and maintaining training courses related to TSC. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact: tsc@pecb.org.

For further information, please visit www.pecb.org/en/training

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