Mattson argues quite rightly that making the wrong decisions about employee layoffs can put a company in a serious state of disadvantage especially as the economy starts to rebound. After all, employees that remain following an organisational restructuring effort will determine its future success. The bottom line is that in times where layoffs are necessary, it is imperative to retain the best, most motivated and high potential employees.

That said, it is of common sense and knowledge that in order to do well, an organisation must retain its best employees. The problem many managers face is the lack of data to make informed decisions. This is exactly what Mattson means by seeing a need to "democratise" human capital management. Human capital management these days is purely a HR process where the rest of the organisation contributes information once or twice a year. A transformation in this process is required to help managers identify their best performers with vital information and statistics and do their best to retain these top performers.

To "democratise" this process would mean to empower every employee to make performance and competence measurement part of their daily routine. This will help managers identify employees who have both potential and motivation. After all, people perform differently under different conditions; differentiating the 'once a year' top performers from the all year round top performers would provide excellent intelligence to managers.

With the right tools, human capital management can be transformed into a democratic process where vital information is passed on the the strategic decision makers. In the weeks to come, I will discuss more about Mattson's views on the democratising process itself. I hope that with today's article, some seeds of doubt have been raised with regards to your organisation's human capital management processes.

Edit: In my article I had neglected to add in the "Asian context" of Mattson's views. What I meant was that, these views are especially applicable to Asian companies, where many HR processes are driven from top down, there to fulfill administrative functions. Companies go through the motions once a year to fulfill their HR departments' performance management requirements. By democratising these processes, these would cease to be an annual pointless exercise and present top management with very good data to help with decision making.