“Employers have to give up on the idea that employees will stay forever”--

“Employers have to give up on the idea that employees will stay forever”(1)

2007-06-05 15:30:16 [ Big Normal Small ] Xing Zong 　Comment

About Prof. Cappelli Peter
Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School, Director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA and a member of the executive committee of the National Center on Post-Secondary Improvement for the U.S. Department of Education at Stanford University. He has degrees in industrial relations from Cornell University and in labor economics from Oxford where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He has been a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, a German Marshall Fund Fellow, and a faculty member at MIT, the University of Illinois, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as The Wharton School. He was a staff member on the Secretary of Labor's Commission on Workforce Quality and Labor Market Efficiency from 1988-'90 and was recently named by Vault.com as one the 25 most important people working in the area of human capital.

Professor Cappelli's research has examined changes in the workplace and their effects on employers. His publications include Change at Work (Oxford University Press 1997), a major study for the National Planning Association on the restructuring of U.S. industry and its effects on employees, and The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce (Harvard Business School Press 1999), which examines the challenges associated with the decline in lifetime employment relationships. His recent work on managing retention and on new approaches to recruiting appears in the Harvard Business Review.
Recently, Xing Zong, a 5th year Ph.D. student at Duke University took a short interview with Prof. Cappelli.

Interview
Xing Zong: Prof. Cappelli, thanks for taking my interview. First question for you is about role that the human resource department is playing in the modern business world. Some new trends show that more and more HR begin to participate in the strategic blueprint of the company. Compared with 20 years ago, do you think the traditional responsibility of HR has changed?

Peter Cappelli: The basic tasks haven’t changed. The difference now is that “talent” in the sense of skills is in short supply. That means HR has a much more challenging role in finding, developing, and now retaining skilled workers. Difficulty in meeting that challenge is a huge constraint on business operations.

Xing Zong: With the rapid economic growth, there have been more private enterprises in China. Many of these companies are family business and therefore have the “founder-culture”. In the founders’ eyes, HR department can be neglected. What is your comment on that?

Peter Cappelli: If they want to stay as family firms and have everyone who works there be part of the family, that’s probably true. Family ties can substitute for professional management. If they start employing non-family members, then they have to change.

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