Human Assets

Organizations, webservers, or core banking system don’t build themselves, and the success of any organization, its innovation or excellent business processes are in fact built, and applied by human. Usually when we talk about our data center, we describe it as we have edge technology, very powerful systems and best IT employees in the region. That because we would never had the ability to run this data center without capable, innovative, motivated employees who spend day and night to keep it up.

The main pillar of any organization is the employee, without his efforts and capabilities organizations would never perform. For that human is considered an asset for any organization, this asset is more valuable that any other asset those organizations have, regardless of their business. This valuable asset should be optimized to increase the return of investment, to explain that I will compare my current and former employers and highlight the differences between them. My former employer used to give considerably low wages to save cost on human resources, and consolidate multiple positions into one. This approach made employee turnover really high and the quality of employees used to be less because of their style. Employees were demotivated and stressed out all the time, and this affected the level of service they offer to customers.

On the other hand, my current employer every two years works together with human resources Consultancy Company to evaluate all positions and their wages to compare it with the market. Based on this evaluation, employees get salary appraisals, and promotions. My current employer invests to make sure that what they offer is really competitive with the market in order to retain the employees, keep them motivated and attract talented resources. Employees are considered as the most valuable asset in this organization, and because of this approach, most employees are happy, motivated and employee turnover is really low.

I believe for any organization to succeed, they should pay more attention to their HR department and HR policies. HR executives should be treated as business partners, have a voice about the business strategy and advise in business direction, this because “the HR function is critical to maintaining the staff and maintaining the culture that drives the company” (Henneman, 2005).

Reference:

Smith, P. J. (1997), ‘The 8 practices of exceptional companies: How great organizations make the most of their human assets.’ Human Resource Management, 36: 367–369. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-050X(199723)36:3<367::AID-HRM8>3.0.CO;2-U, [Online]. (Accessed 16 June 2011)

Dickerson, C., (2003), 'Minding human assets', InfoWorld, 25, 3, p. 47, Computers & Applied Sciences Complete, EBSCOhost, [Online]. (Accessed 16 June 2011)

Henneman, T., (2005), 'Diversified assets', Workforce Management, 84, 3, pp. 42-44, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, [Online]. (Accessed 16 June 2011)