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The Role of People in Business

There are tens of thousands of different jobs in business organisations around the world. If we tried to classify these different types of jobs into groups, it would take us a long time, as well as quite a lot of space!

We can, however, classify people into 4 main roles within a business. The diagram below helps to summarise these 4 main roles.

Employer: The role of people as employer means that an individual may represent a business and hire workers for the business. The employer has a number of responsibilities which include providing a safe and healthy working environment and at least the National Minimum Wage.

Employee: The vast majority of people in business are employees. An employee is recruited to provide a service for the business in one or more of the functional areas of a business. This might be in administration, accounts, marketing, sales, production and so on. The service might be physical (for example the contribution made by miners extracting coal or an individual employed to clean the streets) or mental (for example the work carried out by a solicitor). In return for the service they offer to the business the employee expects to receive a payment in the form of a wage or salary.

Employees provide a wide range of different services to a business. People are hired because of the contribution that they make to the business. This can be the skills that the worker brings to the job, their creativity, effort, personality and so on. What does the person who operates this machine bring to a business? Copyright: Adrian Adrian, from stock.xchng.

Manager: Because there are lots of resources that are needed to carry out production, someone or a group of people, have to take some responsibility to manage all these resources. A manager is a person who carries out some form of direction and control of resources in a business or organisation. In many cases they may also be owners of a business or employees.

Management can be found in business organisations at different levels. Managers might come in for some criticism at times but without their skills, many businesses would not survive. Copyright: Constantin Kammerer, from stock.xchng.

Shareholder/Owner: Some people take on the role of business owners. They might be in a position of setting up their own small business and taking a very direct role in running the business or they can be a shareholder in a large business organisation and have very little to do with the day to day running of the business. Shareholders in private limited companies might not only be owners but might also be heavily involved in running the business.

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