It has taken the labour market centuries to come to an understanding of what organizations are really about and whose needs they serve. As the business field developed to the post-modernity stage, paradigm shifts in the human resource area forced changes in overall business strategies. Technology and capital, easy to access and to copy, can no longer be a competitive advantage and investing in people became a necessity. Being the most efficient resource with the most potential, people are not property of any company; unlike other resources, they need special treatment and acknowledgement of their individual needs. To be able to have people as a competitive advantage, the company’s has to let these needs drive all four key HR processes – attraction, recruitment, development and retention.
The most common way to define human needs is using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. While physiological needs do not in any way depend on the employer and those of safety needs that do (appropriate work conditions, sanitary code) are regulated by labour legislation, many actions can be taken to satisfy status and being needs to maximize the positive effect of cooperation between the employer and the employee. While people spend about a third of their lives sleeping, time at work takes almost a half of able-bodied citizens’ time and, therefore, has a huge impact on their well-being.
Most (if not all) individuals have the need of belongingness – they need to belong to groups of different sizes and dimensions through their whole life – be it a family, a political party, a nation or a religious group. The importance of the feeling of belongingness to the company people work for is often underestimated; however, it is often greater than that for a family: while many individuals spend more time at work than with their relatives, some do not have a family at all and therefore socialize most with their co-workers. …
