Name: Steven P Sanderson IIDate: 6/30/06Class: Into to Business BA11 5040

This reaction report is in regard to chapter 11 which deals with human resource management, finding and keeping valuable employees. As you may know today there seems to be very little employee to company or company to employee loyalty anymore. This is something that needs to be dealt with in today society and it is the job of human resource managers to facilitate the process. First to understand what the role of a human resource manager plays in a company of today we need to know what and who they are.

Human resource management is the process of determining human resource needs and then recruiting, selecting, developing, motivating, evaluating, compensating and scheduling employees to achieve organizational goals. Motivation as you remember was talked about in chapter 10. Today human resource management is receiving major attention due to the fact that the U.S. economy has experienced a major shift form traditional manufacturing industries to service industries which require the workforce to be willing to be reeducated if necessary and work in a fast changing environment, which would also require constant education. For example Sun Micro Systems spent $39 million to ready a facility that will make sophisticated mainframe servers used by airports and hospitals. Part of the money was spent sending employees for retraining.

I can personally attest to how a company would want to spend money on their employees so they will be updated on the latest procedures and technical know how. I work in a hospital and we deal with of course medical insurance, it’s how the hospital gets paid and in turn pays me. I deal with registering patients and verifying their insurance. This is very important, because as I am sure you know insurance is always changing and when I say changing I mean by figuring on way s to not pay. Luckily for me the hospital I work at has over the years developed a comprehensive training for us on how to determine if the patient has active coverage and if they have more than one policy, who to bill first, who gets billed and for what, along with a host of other things.

Some people have called people the ultimate resource and I would have to say they are right. If companies did not have an educated work force and the people who need to have the know how of keeping people motivated did not have those skills we would still be in a corporate stone age so to speak. Let’s now take a look at the human resource challenge. First there are shortages in people trained to work in the growth areas of the future, such as computers, biotechnology, robotics and sciences. In 2002 it is estimated that half a million American IT jobs went unfulfilled. There is also a huge population of workers skilled or unskilled workers form industries such as steel, automobile making and the garment industry who are unemployed or underemployed. Underemployed workers are those who have more skills or knowledge then their current jobs require. Believe it or not but today there are a growing number of people who are also undereducated. There are also a complex set of laws that involve safety, unionization, equal pay amongst other things, that take companies beyond a profit orientation to more fair and socially conscious.

Human resource managers also need to go through a process of determining their needs. There is a five step process to determining needs. The process is as follows: first you need to prepare an inventory of the organizations employees. The inventory needs to contain names, ages, education, capabilities and so forth. Next you would need to prepare a job analysis. A job analyses is a study of what is done by employees who hold various job titles. Such analyses are necessary in order to recruit and train good employees. To find the right employees many companies place job descriptions with the classifieds of papers, magazines and the internet. Human resource managers also need to assess future human resource demands. Since technology changes rapidly, training programs must be started long before they’re needed. Proactive managers will be able to anticipate these needs and have the people ready for them. Going hand in hand with future demand is assessing future supply. Since the labor force is constantly changing, people get older and people move, this means there could be times of over and undersupply. Lastly a strategic plan needs to be made. This plan will need to address recruiting, selecting, training and developing amongst other things the human resources.

Once these employees are obtained, they need to be kept. To do this employees must be praised, compensated, also additional hiring or firing may be needed. To have ay type of performance appraisal, standards must be set up and met. This is a crucial step. Next those standards need to be communicated in such a way that every employee understands. Employee performance also needs to be evaluated otherwise it is impossible to know if they need more training or if they need to be praised raised or fired. Remember information and knowledge is the keys to anything.