Human Resource Responsibilities and Roles

Essay by knkittyUniversity, Bachelor'sA-, July 2008

download word file, 5 pages 5.0

Today's workers are gaining deeply held beliefs in self-reliance, independence, life balance, and individualism that support their actions, which are slowly altering their workplace and environment by this behavior. These behaviors and beliefs are cross-generational responses to life's' changing demands. By studying and understanding these trends, human resource professionals can redefine their roles and become leaders in helping their organizations to prepare for and manage their employee power. In order to accomplish this, human resources must perform a transformation.

As an example; in most retail organizations, patterns of weak human resource departments, whereas the companies do not view the human resource department as a strategic business partner or as an indispensable part of the organization. Usually the retail assessments show merchandising, finance, or marketing are of the main areas of rating in each departments value and contributions to the company's success in the company's view. Human Resources and loss prevention ratings come last in value.

In the retail business, senior management generally does not reflect human resources competence but their relevance. Management rarely involves human resources in company strategic planning and hardly ever asks the department to contribute to marketing or growth decisions. In the views of management, Human Resource is another expense and a drain on the company profits.

Part of the human resources transformation begins with the deep understanding to people and their quality-of-life choices. Quality of work life is stated; "Work to live or live to work"? (Bundy 1997) Many older managers have views which the younger workers have poor work ethics or nonexistent work ethic. The younger worker today say "get a life" and will not be caught in what they believe is an existence which is imbalanced. Yet the younger managers face difficulties with older workers who are not willing to accept the face paced...