ABSTRACT
If employees are so important, why do so many companies entrust them to bad managers?
Rodd Wagner and Jim Harter
Consider, for a moment, the title of this chapter. Instead, of “The Management of Human Resources” I could have called it “Personnel Management” since it pretty much means the same thing. There is a difference, though. The former term gives more credence to the importance of people as a resource. The latter is just a cold administrative concept. Of course, calling people a resource might be taken to suggest that people are the possessions of a company. That’s not true. People cannot be treated like machines or buildings; they have personalities, desires, and needs, and they leave the workplace to go home at the end of the day. Machines do not. Just how important are people? It’s obvious that we cannot run an animal facility without people, and right now about 60% of my operating budget goes to staff salaries and benefits. Consequently, give or take a little, human resources represent about $5 million of my annual expense budget. If that amount of money was capital equipment, I would be very careful about its use, so if we actually were to think of people as machines, people are probably the most important pieces of capital equipment we have in our animal facilities. This analogy between people and equipment would have intrigued René Descartes, the philosopher who centuries ago characterized animals as machines of nature. Today’s enlightened manager recognizes that human resources and the animals we care for are anything but machines. The people with whom we interact, whether inside or outside our organization, are critical resources who want and should receive the same respect and
consideration that you and I want. As managers, we must recognize that these are our colleagues, not pawns to be sacrificed as needed. As managers, we must recognize that employees (including ourselves) who have a higher level of job satisfaction will produce a higher level of customer satisfaction [1], and keeping our customers satisfied is one of our major responsibilities.
