Problem:
The excerpt is from the Personnel Director's Handbook, written by William E. Scheer and published by the Dartnell Corporation in 1969. After reading, please share observations, briefly, about:
- The differences between the past and current roles in this profession,
- How and why the roles have changed,
- What might the future hold for the field of HRM, and
- How might you prepare for a future career in the HRM field
**Accepting the Inconsequential as the Significant
Because they have not been allowed to participate as active members of management, many personnel men attempt to gain status and job security by building up the inconsequential aspects of their jobs into activities of apparently major import. For example, too many personnel directors give too much misplaced emphasis to such "tail of the dog" activities as:
1. Maintaining vacation, sick-pay, and group insurance accrual records (which are undoubtedly duplicated in payroll.) Need Assignment Help?
2. Checking for accuracy and approving: wage requests, promotion recommendations, retirement sign-ups, and other forms (usually in multiple copies, and which in no way contribute to the decisions made by or to the productivity problems faced by the originating supervisors) .
3. Processing employment, and recruiting. (Instead of counseling with managers on matters of manpower planning, allocation, and utilization. Typical is the personnel department which is trying to fill a requisition for 200 engineers, but which has never shown the engineering manager ways of analyzing his workload to determine if some of the 200 spots could be filled by lower-skilled people.)
4. Setting up recreation programs, service-award dinners, newsletters and other delightfully inconsequential drivel, about which a profit-problem-centered management could hardly care less. (And we waste college-trained M.B.A.'s on this kind of nonsense because the status-seeking personnel director won't admit that an average clerk can handle it.)
The clerically oriented, detail-minded personnel director will never recognize the high calling he could embrace as a participating member of management as a strong influence upon business management decisions and the underlying management thinking from the top down.