2021
Working Paper
HBS Working Paper Series

Accounting for Organizational Employment Impact

By: David Freiberg, Katie Panella, George Serafeim and T. Robert Zochowski

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:88

Abstract

Organizations create significant positive and negative impacts through their employment practices. This paper builds on the substantial body of research regarding job quality and impact measurement to present a framework for monetized analysis of employment impact. We identify and propose a framework for measuring the four most salient dimensions of impact for employees, including wage quality, career advancement, opportunity, and health and wellbeing, as well as two principle impacts, diversity and employment location, for the broader labor community. The framework and methodology for calculating employment impact-weighted accounting figures is applied to several large corporations, resulting in positive impacts that range between 25 and 257% of their EBITDA suggesting significant heterogeneity in employment practices across organizations. These results demonstrate the feasibility of calculating employment impact in monetary terms, and provide a foundation for future application across additional geographies and contexts.

Keywords

Impact-Weighted Accounts; IWAI; Employment Impact; Employment; Jobs and Positions; Quality; Measurement and Metrics; Analysis; Framework

Citation

Freiberg, David, Katie Panella, George Serafeim, and T. Robert Zochowski. "Accounting for Organizational Employment Impact." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-050, October 2020. (Revised August 2021.)