Organization's Most Valuable Assets Are

¶ … organization's most valuable assets are its human resources; without personnel no company could survive. From upper-level management to interns, human resources are the heart, soul, and backbone of any business. Therefore, good human resource management is necessary for the full functioning of any company, large or small. Human resources can be handled differently in different organizations, depending on their type, their philosophy, and their size. Companies that handle human resources well have happy employees and low turnover rates compared with companies that do not.

Therefore, good human resource management can save a company time and money. I have worked for several different organizations, from relatively large ones like national department stores to small companies that are run out of the owner's basement. In the large retailer, human resources was a huge, multi-staffed department. Human resources were handled bureaucratically, with lots of paperwork to process and a hierarchical chain in the human resources office. There are definite pros and cons to such an approach to human resources.

On the one hand, large companies have to be highly organized with regards to their personnel. New employees might need to receive special training. Each new applicant has to be properly screened. During the job application process, people sometimes have to take written exams to qualify for certain positions, and in some cases, the company demanded drug tests. The process involved many forms, each of which had to be properly filed, and their data put into computer databases for company records.

Human resources worked closely with accounts payable, for the purposes of compiling accurate payroll records. Most large organizations need to perform their human resources management with such hierarchies in place because there are simply too many employees working at the company at any one time to have a more personal approach. This is not to say that human resources management personnel are not friendly, because in most cases they were. The small company for which I worked had a completely different approach to human resources.

As a one-person shop with only five employees, the owner of the company performed all the human resources management. The owner's system was disorganized but adequate to meet the needs of his organization. With only five people to manage and pay, there was no need for the types of formal paperwork that larger organizations needed to function smoothly.

The owner could keep track of the names of all his employees, and with the aid of easy-to-use computer software programs, had their personal information (date of birth, Social Security number, and address) input alongside their year-to-date earnings. Moreover, the human resources "department" was integrated seamlessly into its related divisions within the organization, such as accounts payable. There was no need for extraneous paperwork.

Small businesses naturally have a more personal approach to human resources, and I have noticed that in many cases, the one-person approach is more effective and efficient. In a multi-person, multi-function human resources division, mistakes are more regular and occasionally more devastating. For example, one coworker moved and for six months her paychecks went to her old address. Every month she went to the human resources division and reminded them of her address change.

Human resources assured her that the address had been updated in the computer database and that accounts payable had her new address on record. Yet somewhere along the way, someone was obviously making a mistake. Another reason why human resources management can be trickier in a large corporation with a multi-function, multi-staff operation is because miscommunications and confusions are inevitable. When the human resource office is staffed by different employees, it is easy for messages to miss their intended targets.

Furthermore, multi-function human resources departments deal with a plethora of different tasks. The multi-tasking occasionally works smoothly, but sometimes multi-tasking results in errors. From these experiences I can conclude that there is no sure-fire way to properly handle human resources, but there are tips and tricks organizations can use to make human resources a smoothly functioning department. First, employees should always be treated with the utmost respect. Because part of human resources concerns the fielding of complaints and concerns, human resources management needs to listen carefully to employees.

Issues like sexual harassment or safety concerns will be dealt with differently in a large organization than a small one. For instance, the department store for.