Business brief

" Business brief

Personnel is the Cinderella of company departments. Production managers manage production, sales heads head up their sales teams, but personnel directors do not, strictly speaking, direct personnel.

They act more as facilitators for other departments: they deal with recruitment in conjunction with department managers, they administer payment systems in tandem with accounts, they аге perhaps present at performance appraisal reviews when employees discuss with their managers how they аге doing, they may be responsible for providing training, in industrial relations they аrе involved in complaints and disputes procedures, and they often have to break the news when people аге dismissed.

Companies like to say that people аrе their most valuable asset, and personnel management has in many organisations been renamed human resources management to reflect this.

HRM specialists may be involved in:

• introducing more 'scientific' selection procedures: for example the use of tests to see what people аге really like and what they аге good at, rather than just depending оn how they соmе across in interviews.

• implementing policies of empowerment, where employees and managers аге given authority to make decisions previously made at higher levels.

• actions to eliminate racial and sexual discrimination in hiring and promotion and to fight harassment in the workplace: bullying and sexual harassment.

• incentive schemes to increase motivation through remuneration systems designed to reward performance.

But their services may also be required when organisations downsize and delayer, eliminating levels of management to produce а lean оr flat organisation, trying to maintain the morale of those that stay and arranging severance packages for employees who are made redundant, sometimes offering outplacement services, for example putting them in touch with potential employers and advising them оn training possibilities. (These packages аrе not to be confused with the compensation packages of top managers: their basic salary and other benefits.)

Professional people who аге made redundant may be able to make а living as freelancers, or in modern parlance, portfolio workers, working for а number of clients. They hope to bе оn the receiving end when companies outsource activities, perhaps ones that were previously done in-house.

This is all part of flexibility, the idea that people should be ready to change jobs more often, be prepared to work part-time and so оп. The message is that the era of lifetime employment is over and that people should acquire and develop skills to maintain their employability. See the brief оn Organisations оn page 63 for more оn flexibility.