Joanna Stevenson

Employee wellness as intellectual capital: an accounting perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify employee wellness as a further component of intellectual capital and to illustrate how it might be possible to account for it in ways that depart from accountings traditional focus on costs and valuations.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is discursive in approach, considering a range of ideas relevant to visualising employee wellness as intellectual capital and how to account for it as such.Findings – Employee wellness a component of primary intellectual capital, being something that employees bring to their organisations together with their experience, expertise, know‐how, leadership skills, creativity, etc. It is also a component of secondary intellectual capital envisaged as initiatives designed to promote greater levels of health and fitness among employees. While it is not possible to place financial valuations on employee wellness, individual or collectively, it is possible to develop metrics that will communicate useful information to a var...

Towards recognising workforce health as a constituent of intellectual capital: Insights from a survey of UK accounting and finance directors☆

Abstract To date workforce health and wellbeing have not been recognised as one of the key constituents of the human capital component of intellectual capital. In an era when workforces are widely acknowledged as being highly valuable assets, and therefore in large part worth retaining within the organisation by virtue of their contribution to the value creation and delivery process, a healthy workforce would seem to be a doubly important asset to cultivate. This paper presents and discusses the findings of an exploratory questionnaire survey of senior accounting and finance practitioners regarding some of the issues associated with recognising workforce health and wellbeing as an additional constituent of intellectual capital. The study was carried out in the UK, the site of a continuing, costly sickness absence problem.