A new report commissioned by McDonald’s UK (yes, the fast food company, I had to look it up to make sure too) shows that you actually can put a price on things like communication and teamwork: roughly 88 billion British pounds, according to Forbes. This is expected to grow to 109 billion pounds over the next five years. One may wonder how, exactly, soft skills such as interpersonal skills, responsibility, and teamwork can be quantified. According to page 36 of the report itself, authored by Development Economics, researchers began with a baseline estimate of the entire value of the UK’s economic activity—1.36 trillion pounds in 2011. To then find how much of this was attributable to soft skills, Development Economics looked at a model outlined in this 2008 paper from the Economic Research Institute of Northern Ireland, which disaggregates total economic activity into five drivers: investment, skills, innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition. The model was then adapted towards disaggregating the impact of soft skills, incorporating into it other academic and non-academic research in order to do so.