Question

1. Should a company have an HR department? Please associate with what you have learned from Chapter 2--“organizational demands and environmental influences”, such as business strategy, company characteristics, culture, and so on, to support your standpoint.

2. What can substitute the function of an HR department? Please give at least three substitutions and supporting reasons.

Answer 1

1. It depends on the scale of the organisation and the functions within it to determine if it needs a dedicated HR department or can do with the system where certain tasks like recruitment of some categories of employees and appraisal can be done in house ( assigned to an individual) and the more complex HR functions like recruitment of specialists and training / development of employees outsourced. For many family run organisations, the HR tasks of recruitment, compensation and benefits, appraisal and strategic HR planning is done by the owners, till the business grows to a level that such tasks are difficult to manage single handed by someone. In many other businesses, where the tasks of employees are limited, such as wood carving or block printing, the owner is usually one of the subject matter experts who can handle the task of HR himself /herself. However, For any progressive organisation of a significant size, HR department is essential, because sooner or later it will need one, to support the need of a growing organisation as a strategic partner, where it can match the HR strategy with broad vision of the company, its business strategy, its culture and specific needs of the business under given conditions.

2. IN the cases where it is not feasible for a company to have a full fledged HR department, the functions can be assigned to following persons.

(a) Business Owner - Being solely responsible for the profit and loss of the company, the owner is the right person who known the organisation, its culture and its demands inside out. He is the best person to do HR tasks in the best interests of the company. This is a practice in many small family run organisations.

(c) Subject matter expert - The recruitment, training and development, appraisal of a technical or specific roles hat need subject matter expertise can be done by a experienced person of the same field. In this way, a production person can be managed by a senior production manager, while an accounting professional can be recruited and mentored by head of the accounts and so on.

(d) Outsourcing - For those companies having fewer recruitment, training and development needs, and where the scale of business does not support the need of a full fledged HR, the activities can be outsourced to an external agency having competency in that domain.