Understanding Organisations and the Role of Human Resources

Understanding Organisations and the Role of Human Resources
Name
CourseProfessorUniversity StateDate
Activity A
Annex Publishers: A publishing firm situated in Annex House on the intersection of two busy streets in Lynn. The firm is engaged in publishing religious books, motivational books, magazines, and journals for its clients. The organization began in 2006 as a small printing firm and became a publishing firm in 2010. The firm publishes monthly journals and magazines for various churches and organizations around Essex County. Besides these, the firm receives and publishes manuscripts for individual writers. Annex publishers has several Departments, which include Registry, Editing Department, Human Resource, Production and Accounts. Currently the firm still uses a manual system to record and store information for its diverse customers and the storage of book records.


Organizational Structure
The Annex organizational design structure has a hierarchical organization structure. This structure is made up of functional design structure composed of Human Resource, Finance, marketing among others. These organizational structures are quite autonomous where a senior staff who reports to the Managing director of the specific department leads each of the department.
Rationale
Annex Publishers has been having challenge to manage the publishing transactions for individual writers. This is because the firm uses a manual system that is tedious and slow. Receipts are processed manually using receipt books, which are prone to errors as tracing, and correction of errors is difficult. The manual system poses a threat to data security, as data is stored in filing cabinets whose keys may be accessed by intruders (Taylor, 2008). The firm came up with a proposed solution of implementing a transactions management system for its Publishing activities.


Vision
“To be The Premier Worldwide Provider of Religious Books and Stationery Products and Services”
Corporate Vision
The corporate vision Annex Publishers is to be social responsible publishing form.
The Organizational Culture
The culture of the firm is pluralistic. Under this culture, all the aspect of a job is analyzed before decision-making. Moral judgment is used to judge the actions of employees in the basis Morality principles where good gain the highest priority (Taylor, 2008, p. 38). The effects of pluralism culture in annex have had a strong impact on the effectiveness of the organizational especially on the Human Resource department. Under this culture, the Human Resource manager has been responsible for understanding the needs of the diverse cultural employees in the organization and addressing them. Annex has a workforce that is composed of a people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. This diversity in the workforce has posed different positive values, attitudes, and norms that have helped in effectiveness, in the operations of the organization.
The diverse cultural needs at Annex have been addressed on the basis of gender, race ethnicity or religious background. The level of co-operation at this organization has also been high which has played a pivotal role in enhancing growth for the organization. One important requirement has been for the Human resource managers to undertake cross-cultural trainings in the firm to communicate the complexities associated with a pluralism multicultural workforce in the company (Reiss, 2012).



Figure 1: Departmental Organizational Structure


Activity B
TO: The Board
FROM: (Student’s Name)
DATE: 30 May 2014
SUBJECT: Human Resource Department Report
Introduction
The success of any given business largely relies on the performance of the human resources department. In the business world, the human resource is important since it delivers the human functionality and the manner through which they relate with one another (Taylor, 2008, p. 61). Moreover, it is an essential aspect of business as it is an integral component of management. In one way or another, it plays an important role in governing the means through which the human resource in business in maintained towards the attainment of goals. The staff in this department has been working in the Human Resource Department under the supervision of Hilary Myles, who is the Human Resource Department Manager, Annex Publishers. The Human Resource Department is composed of 5 staff members who are involved in a range of different tasks and smaller explorations that are allocated to them by their supervisors (Reiss, 2012). This report present three major areas identified as the central themes why Learning and Development is a crucial section for the organization and why its size should not be downsized or at worse closed.
Methods
1.0 Human Resource activities that support the organization’s strategy
The Human Resource Department has been concerned with many roles in the organization that aim to uplift the standards whilst maximizing on profits and overall performance. The roles involved in this department ranges from ...