At one sitting, I browsed through over 10 contributions to the thread on
Human resourses. My views are as follows:
- I do not object to the term resource used in the context of an
organisation or nation.
I am comfortable with the term because we use the word management of
resourses - Finance and Material. So why not Human Resourse?
Organisations have groups(departments/division etc) who manage the three
resources. However, there are special groups that seem to have
specialisation in identifying better ways of managing these resources
across the organisation - Eg. Finance & Accounts Group. I am in one of
those groups called Corporate Human Resource Management Group. In our
search for better ways for utilising our resources and making them
effective, we find new ideas such as LO. I do agree, individuals are
important, but from an organisations point of view, they dont contribute
effectively in one organisational culture, while they do in another
culture. Thus we have managers managing people based on their beliefs
about their employees. The Human Resources Management group has the task
of changing these beliefs, if those beliefs are making people less
effective in the organisation. In this context, employees are a resource.
Money, machine or raw material are not a resource, if they are not
productive to the organisations purpose. Similarly, employees can also be
a resource, or not a resource. At least in our Indian environment, many
(individuals) unfortunately can remain deadwood and still survive in the
organisation, get their pay check etc. till the whole system crumbles.
Most organisations are tolerant to such deadwoods. Most managements are
forced to live with them. That makes the task of Human Resource
Management more challenging. It is in this context that I submit that
employees are a resource. This is not a dabatable term, it makes no
difference to me if employees are not considered as a resources, but in
the end have an environment that make them useful to the Organisations
purpose.
- I do not think organisations need to quantify the value of their
employees, because of my views above, the human value becomes dynamic in
the organisational environment.
benjamin@anand.nddb.ernet.in
[Thomas P=B]
--"Thomas P Benjamin" <BENJAMIN@anand.nddb.ernet.in>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>