What are the pronouns it and them in the following sentence : how much time, money, and effort it takes them?

Question

The text book explains the word "productivity" as following :

the amount of work that a person, company, etc. does compared with how much time, money, and effort it takes them.

Here I cannot understand the part "it takes them"

I am familiar with the verb 'take'. For example

'It takes the tragedy of Tom's death for us to meet here'

which is a slight modification of sentence in some script.

I think the following is correct.

how much time, money and effort it takes for them to do

How would you say about my opinion ?

Answer 1

The simplest way to explain the pronouns is to replace them with what they stand for:

*"the amount of work that a person, company, etc. does compared with how much time, money, and effort [the work] takes [the person, company, etc]."

Obviously you would never write such a sentence.