Entrepreneurial Finance: Fundamentals of Financial Planning and Management for Small Business

CHAPTER 19 HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Human Resource Management refers to managing the workforce of an organization at all levels. It would include all the employee-related issues from recruiting to terminating. Managing all the employees' affairs in a small business is no less important than in a large corporation. It might be different only in the scale of the function. Today, human resource management is affected by many economic and social changes which were not present in the past. Among these changes, for example, are the technological revolution in the field of information and communication that brought the e-mail and internet and cell phones, and made them accessible and functional for almost everybody. This sort of change has added speed and efficiency in the way communications occur. Globalization is another change that made the world seem smaller and connected. Outsourcing is an economic change that did not exist before, and it has a direct and strong effect on the domestic employment status. Other changes are the increasing diversity in the labor force and the non-traditional changes in family structure such as the increase in the single parent families, single gender families, childless families, dual or multi-earner families, and the elderly families. Also, among these changes are the immigration issues and the regulatory side of business. Generally speaking, human resource management focuses on the firm's staffing and employees issues through two major elements: ...