Historically, companies have tended to view their employees as expenses. And in a down economy, the desire to manage expenses often translates into reduced worker hours, salary cuts and employee layoffs. The nation's growing unemployment rate serves as stark evidence of this theory.

Companies could be looking at things all wrong. An alternative is to view employees not as expenses that should be managed, but as long-term investments that should be harvested. In other words, while the costs of an employee may be fixed and finite, that employee's potential is infinite.

In the current recessionary environment, many business owners seem to be panicking. But companies that regard personnel expenses collectively as an investment have a competitive advantage. The return on the investment is employee productivity. The trick, of course, is knowing how to motivate your employees to get the most out of them.

There are studies aplenty on what truly impacts employee productivity. One recent analysis by the Harvard Business Review found that most traditional human resource metrics, such as employee turnover rate and total hours of training, are not good predictors of organizational performance.

Rather, the research found a core set of drivers that predict performance: leadership practices, employee engagement, knowledge accessibility, workforce optimization and organizational learning capacity.

By using surveys to score themselves across the five major drivers, companies can benchmark their capabilities, identify strengths and weaknesses, and link improvements or backsliding in specific practices with improvements or shortcomings in performance.

With focused measurement tools, small- and mid-sized companies in particular can begin to gauge how well they are managing and developing their employees. By emphasizing the five areas above, companies can impact productivity by an average of 6 percent to 12 percent.

A truly successful people business is one whose economic profit is 30 percent or more above its employee costs, rather than the typical 10 percent. Companies that can do this create assets that make their businesses much more than the sum of their employees.