Building a Wiki of HR Knowledge and Practice, Essay Example

Topic 1: Strategic Human Resource Management – Ethical Stewardship

Strategic human resource management allows human resource professionals to play a more substantial role in contributing to their organization’s success by developing new systems and policies that are aligned with their company’s values. Due to the economic climate, many business professionals believe that the human resources team should be additionally responsible for enacting ethical stewardship in order to benefit the organization. Broadly, ethical stewardship is defined as “a model of governance that honors obligations due to the many stakeholders and that maximizes long-term organizational wealth creation” (Caldwell et al., 2011). Professionals believe that if human resource departments adopt this framework in addition to acquiring management professionals that follow the “transformative” category of management, they will be better able to serve the ethical duties of their organization and create a better work environment for employees overall.

This application is useful to businesses because it directs the responsibility of ethical stewardship towards a specific department; it is intuitive that this department would be the human resources staff because they more readily have the manpower and other resources available that will help the company ensure that company and employee practices are legitimate. If the human resources team is able to do this properly and address all employee concerns on the matter, employees will be more productive because they will feel safer in their environment. The disadvantage of this centralization of ethical stewardship is that other departments will be less focused on workplace ethics and the human resources department needs to ensure that knowledge of this policy is up to date throughout the company.

Topic 2: The Organization of the HR Department – Outsourcing

A major organizational suggestion that has been made by business professionals in the past few years is that certain functions of the human resources department should be outsourced, while others suggest outsourcing the department as a whole. By doing so, they believe that businesses can transform their practices into a high performing workforce. To implement a human resources department that is fully or partially outsourced, the company will require several adaptations and new procedures. It is mainly essential for the business to determine ways to enhance communication between the business’s main facility and the outsourced components of human resources.

Some business professionals have considered the outsourcing of the entire human resources department. Although the outsourcing the whole human resources department may be difficult or not ideal for all business types, it could be useful for business who havehuman resourcesfunctions could be outsourced to and better delivered by third-party suppliers cheaply and more efficiently (Brown, 2004).

This trend will allow businesses to grow more quickly, become more productive, and obtain greater profits. In the interest of protecting local jobs however, a full HR outsource model should not be adapted; rather, redundant and simple functions should be outsourced to other companies so that local HR representatives will have more time to focus on important aspects of the business.

Topic 3: Management of Temporary and Contract Employees

Many business professionals believe that a major problem with some companies is that they fail to place the same care in managing temporary and contract employees as they do on permanent ones. This is a dramatic problem because statistics have shown that as businesses are growing, need for these types of employees are growing as well. In addition, temporary and contract workers have been appearing at every level of the organization; from receptionist to CEO. It is therefore important for businesses to invest the same kinds of resources in temporary and contract workers as they do for more permanent employees. Overall, this will benefit the company because temporary workers often provide primary communication with the customers and contractors; in order for the business to be represented well by their temporary and contract employees, these people should be well-trained (Drucker, 2002).

As companies grow, it becomes more and more important for them to need to hire temporary and contract workers; in fact, outsourcing work has become a recent trend to increase company productivity and focus employee workload. An example of this operating at high level business functions involves hiring PEO’s (professional employee organizations) to detract from the responsibilities that the manager has. In fact, 2002 journal article reported that “Managers can easily spend up to one quarter of their time on employee-related rules, regulations, and paperwork” (Drucker, 2002).

Overall, hiring temporary and contract employees is useful for the business because it allows full-tine, permanent employees to focus on more specific job functions. The downside is that these people are usually not well-trained; it is important to create better training programs for these personal in order to increase their work performance.

References

Brown, P. (2010). The power of HR outsourcing. Strategic HR Review, 9(6). 27–32. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1108/14754391011078090

Caldwell, C., Truong, D., Linh, P., & Tuan, A. (2011). Strategic human resource management as ethical stewardship. Journal of Business Ethics, 98(1), 171–182.

Truong DX, Linh TP, Tuan T. (2011). Strategic Human Resource Management as Ethical Stewardship. Journal of Business Ethics, 98, 1.

Drucker, P. F. (2002). They’re not employees, they’re people. Harvard Business Review, 80(2), 70–77. Retrieved from: http://ezp.waldenulibrary.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=6026467&site=ehost-live&scope=site