Ever-increasing Human Resources
November 13th 2007 21:58
When I arrived at the job I had before I came to England, the woman who’d been the boss in the office had moved up into the human resources department. In fact the human resources department increased by two more in the four months I worked in the place.
When I worked in offices, years ago, there was never such a thing as a human resources department. Sometimes there was a personnel officer, but often that was combined with some other role. Human resources wasn’t regarded highly in those days.
Now of course it’s the in thing. Rightly so, in some cases, but also partly because everyone has to have a job contract these days, and the HR people are those who attend to this side of things - at least in big firms. (Small firms have to muddle along as best they can as they always have had to do.)
HR departments even have special human resources software now, in order to keep track of all the minutiae of the personnel, from their contracts to their pay rates, from their bonuses to their holidays, from their performance to their promotion, from their training and development to their goals. With all these things going on it’s almost a wonder employees have enough time to do their jobs.
There’s probably no going back. Having employees just get on with life without vast quantities of information being tracked about them seems unlikely in the near future. Perhaps that’s an advantage of a small firm: everyone is so busy they don’t have time for all the folderol of HR. Which may be a good thing - ormay not.
When I worked in offices, years ago, there was never such a thing as a human resources department. Sometimes there was a personnel officer, but often that was combined with some other role. Human resources wasn’t regarded highly in those days.
Now of course it’s the in thing. Rightly so, in some cases, but also partly because everyone has to have a job contract these days, and the HR people are those who attend to this side of things - at least in big firms. (Small firms have to muddle along as best they can as they always have had to do.)
HR departments even have special human resources software now, in order to keep track of all the minutiae of the personnel, from their contracts to their pay rates, from their bonuses to their holidays, from their performance to their promotion, from their training and development to their goals. With all these things going on it’s almost a wonder employees have enough time to do their jobs.
There’s probably no going back. Having employees just get on with life without vast quantities of information being tracked about them seems unlikely in the near future. Perhaps that’s an advantage of a small firm: everyone is so busy they don’t have time for all the folderol of HR. Which may be a good thing - ormay not.
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