Name: Steven P Sanderson II

Date: 6/30/06
Class: 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.