What does your human resources department do? More particularly, what should it be doing? A recent survey of more than 1,000 human resources and employee relations executives in North America sheds light on these and other questions.

The environmental role of personnel managers has, by and large, been confined to making sure that companies comply with environmental legislation. However, there are growing signs that human‐resource departments are beginning to play a more active part in the greening of the organization....

Business faces a set of critical human problems, and is downgrading the very human resource departments which are supposed to help it to find solutions. Argues that salvation lies in the hands of human resource specialists themselves, who must switch from being administrators and huggers to...

Almost everyone agrees that human resources will play a key role in company success in the next century, but too few firms take a systematic approach to human resource planning. Barron Wells and Nelda Spinks, of the University of South‐Western Louisiana, USA, provide a 15‐step checklist for...

The number of companies attempting to benchmark the activities of their human‐resource department ‐ that is, to compare it with different organizations considered to be the best in their class ‐ is growing. Discusses best practice in the area of people management, based on a benchmarking...

At a time when it has become fashionable in some quarters to question the value which human resource specialists provide to an organization, Motorola has used a people‐centred approach to drive fundamental change. Alan Larson, the company’s senior applications consultant, takes up the story.

Short‐term contracts, redundancies and unemployment insurance hardly sound like features of a socialist society. But all are becoming more common in the People’s Republic of China. Explains why.

Co‐ordinating the moves of employees from one country to another in a multinational like Cable and Wireless is a major challenge. The company’s international resourcing and development unit helps to make the process smoother ‐ without being seen as a costly overhead.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between human resource (HR), situation strength and improvisation behavior. A high degree of “fit” among HR practices and between such practices and organizational strategy, is said to have an impact on organizational...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate conditions for a human resource information system (HRIS) to impact organizational competitiveness. Particularly, the author proposes that an HRIS is a key factor in building dynamic capabilities through fostering codification and...