Hr Roles and Responsibilities

HR Roles and Responsibilities:

Design Cuisine

Human resource management is an inimitable, irreplaceable function in every growing company across the world. Although policies, laws and functions may deviate from continent to continent, its core function stays the same, to manage the company’s most precious resource, human capital. Through the eyes of one of the most prestigious catering companies in the DC area, Design Cuisine we will explore the function of HR in this fast pace and competitive market. We will look at the roles and responsibilities, how HR fits into the organization and Organizational pecking order.

In my exploration of the HR department at Design Cuisine, I had the pleasure of speaking with the ex-director of the department, Jean-Marie Watson. Mrs. Watson was sadly terminated from the company early 2010 after the company had taken a major financial hit because of the rescission. You would normally see it as odd that a company would let go of their HR director, but the company had downsized its personnel so much to the point that a HR department was no longer viable or legally required. “Such is the catering industry, it is very fickle. One month the company has more events then it can handle and the next everything seems to have dried up” Mrs. Watson tells me. Currently the responsibilities of the HR department have been dispersed amongst those in the companies scheduling department.

Like any other company, the responsibilities of Design Cuisine’s HR department are vast and vary greatly from one another. Those responsibilities include (but are limited to) legal compliance, benefit administration, hiring and recruiting, and risk management.

When dealing with legal compliance for a multi-million dollar catering company, a director’s work is never done. Mrs. Watson tells me “You have to worry about things like are all your workers documented, which comes up a lot in a predominantly Hispanic kitchen staff” “You don’t want to be...