Xerox

Xerox

Contrenia L. Fluker

Strayer University

Strategic Human Resource Management

October 26, 2011

Discuss how human resource professionals can ensure that top organizational leaders encourage managers and employees to follow laws and guidelines.

A major part of the employee advocate role is ensuring that people are treated fairly. The human resource function can provide important guidance for treating employees fairly and helping organizations comply with laws (Stewart & Brown, 2009). Complying with laws can save organizations a great deal of money that they may have to fight legal accusations or to try to repair damaged reputations (Stewart & Brown, 2009).

The business ethics environment is chiefly driven by the combination of leadership practices, corporate culture and company programs and HR's role in cultivating an ethics-friendly corporate environment is extremely important as well as working with the company’s top leadership. HR professionals must help ensure that ethics is a top organizational priority and HR leaders should take on a larger role in monitoring the culture of the organization in terms of its ethical status. The organization’s leaders must understand that monitoring alone isn’t sufficient and that HR executives must both take on the responsibility of ethics and ensure that some other capable person in the organization does so.

The human resource department must ensure that the leadership selection and development processes include an ethics component because leaders at all levels of the organization need to both model ethical behavior and communicate ethical standards to employees. The human resource professional is responsible for ensuring that the right programs and policies are in place because of the U.S. government is developing a stricter set of sentencing guidelines. The HR professionals should be aware of these guidelines as well as how they're evolving. An HR professional should be able to customize...