Human Resources Departments: Are they Bad or good?

Common usage within corporations and businesses refers to the individuals within the firm, and to the portion of the firm's organization that deals with hiring, firing, training, and other personnel issues. Human resources has different meanings depending on context.

Human resource management has 5 key functions:
A) Hiring
B) Compensation
C) Evaluation and Management
D) Promotions
E) Managing Relations.
Responsibility of human resource managers to conduct these activities.

Are they a force for Bad or good?

Human resources can be good or bad. Some departments promote fair decent values, some promote a cartel where certain types of people are prevented from working for the company. It is possible for a bully to exploit their position in the department, to bully, or to ban people that they may dislike for bigoted, or immoral excuses. In can be the most ruthless, cartel in the business. Promoting only people who get on with the human resources people. A human resources department is just as capable of discrimination.

Yet in some companies the human resources department can be seen as a good part of the company, helping to stop bullying, promote fair ethnic minority representation and stop exploitation of employees.

There is often an misconception, that just because a department is dealing with "people issues", that it is going to be a department that is positively empathic with victims, and "touchy feely", yet often it can be the other way round. It may just be a department that tries to understand people to better manipulate people.

In some companies, the human resources department is simply about employment and nothing to do with stopping abuse of employees. Understanding people may just be done to get the most out of people. In some companies it may promote ideas that some would see as unfair. In many companies the pure role of Human Resources is to maximize return on investment from the organization's human capital.

not fit in

In some companies different ethnic groups, shy people, mentally ill people, gay people may be prevented from working for the company by the human resources department not on the basis of whether they can do work, but on the basis that they would "not fit in". Many feel that this is unfair in a government run organization, where taxes are provided by the whole population, but where some types of people may not be allowed to work for the company as they would "not fit in". In these sort of companies the anti bullying policy of a company could be described as simply not employing the type of people they think would get bullied (Although bullying is often targeted at anyone). Many see this as deeply immoral. In many companies the HR department will deliberately employ a non qualified individual over a qualified individual just because of the "fitting in" concept. In these companies an interview may just be about the "cut of their jib".

A ruthless "hard nosed" business, or even worse a company with a bullying culture, is not going have a "goody two shoes" department. In some companies it can be the unhuman resources department. A company that encourages it's employees to exploit people (the customer, or the employee), at any cost, is unlikely to have a don't exploit, at any cost, people department. A company with a deliberate bullying culture, is not going to employ people who go against that. Such a department is more likely to promote the ideology.

Human resources deals with two different worlds
A) Non-Unionized - Where management has control
B) Unionized - Where there is shared control through collective agreement

Collective Agreements - Can cover any and all terms and conditions of employment.

Human Resource Management (HRM): A strategic and coherent approach to management of an organization's most valued assets - the people working there who individually and collectively contribute to achievement of the objectives of the business.

The terms human resource management (HRM) and human resources (HR) have largely replaced the term 'Personnel Management' as a description of the processes involved in managing people in organizations.

HRM is seen by practitioners in the field as a innovative view of workplace management than a traditional approach. Its techniques force the managers of an enterprise to express their goals with specificity so that they can be understood and undertaken by the workforce, and to provide the resources for them to successfully accomplish assignments. As such, HRM techniques, when properly practiced, are expressive of the goals and operating practices of the enterprise overall.

The goal of human resource management is to help an organization to meet strategic goals by attracting, and maintaining employees and also to manage them effectively. The premise of the academic theory of HRM is that humans are not machines, therefore we need to have an interdisciplinary examination of people in the workplace.

Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS, EHRMS), Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), HR Technology or also called HR modules, shape an intersection in human resource management (HRM) and information technology. It merges HRM as a discipline and in particular its basic HR activities and processes with the information technology field, whereas planning and programming of data processing systems evolved to standardized routines and packages of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. On the whole, these ERP systems have an origin in software that integrates information from different applications to one universal database. The linkage of its financial and human resource modules through one database is the most important distinction to the individually and proprietary developed predecessors, which makes the software application both rigid and flexible.

Human Resource Consulting firms provides advice to their clients regarding the financial and retirement security, health, productivity, and employment relationships of their global workforce. Areas in which a human resource consulting firm may advise on include

http://www.shrm.org/ Society for Human Resource Management

hr software - human resources software - hr systems - hr interims - hr interim - hr personnel - hr planning - human resources training - outsourcing hr - hr solutions - human resources recruitment - hr uk - human resource courses - hr recruitment - human resources planning - hr recruitment consultants - human resources managers - human resources uk