Sudden and unauthorized transfers of personnel for whatever reason disrupt hats and lines. Every such transfer is a failure to predict concerning personnel.
By a few transfers (“musical chairs”), an area can be totally unmocked.
Personnel people tend to undervalue the time and care necessary to train, hat and apprentice people.
Even a small unit is a “working installation” if it produces. An order to “turn over the hat this morning and take another post” is quite unreal.
Prediction is the button that is usually out in personnel handling.
How many will we need inweeks or months? is the key question. It is the one Personnel should continually work on. Stressing only “Who can we assign to ?” shows a lack of prediction.
Man tends to run in today and seldom in tomorrow much less next week or year. The fault will someday destroy him as a species. He is even unable to predict the fate of his habitat, the planet.
Thus Personnel should be very wary of this fault.
Recruiting for tomorrow instead of yesterday, people in full-time training, future executives being sorted out by today’s performance, all add up to good prediction by Personnel people.
One must catch up the backlog of yesterday’s needs by gradual moving up into the future.
Every key post should have a deputy in training or in apprenticeship for the post. By key post is meant one that has urgent responsibility and great expertise.
Personnel will see where it stands by just listing their current answers to these questions:
1. What are the key posts of the org or activity that require great expertise and training? From top to bottom list them out.
2. How many of the above list have people in training or apprenticeship for them?
3. What will be the personnel scene on these posts in one year?
4. What plans did you have yesterday to do this?
5. What plans can be made now to do this?
Having actually done the above questions, one will see what prediction consists of regarding personnel and a sample of what it means to predict.
This should be done at full org level and then at divisional level and then at department level.
Then one will see that sudden transfers done without training or apprenticeship can be avoided in the future at key levels IF ONE PROGRAMS IT NOW. And then ACTS to make the program work out.
Where prediction is out, expansion becomes impossible to do without collapse.
For one has to predict expansion as well.
An action on expansion would be:
1. To increase the org’s stats five times (GDSes and GI) how many more trained, hatted people would be needed:
While the last (1 to q) are not properly “Personnel” the personnel action would collide with them so hard that personnel action would be stopped. “Do not hire anyone else!” “Do not” “Do not”
So somebody says, “We are going to boost the GI from $100 to $50,000.”
Well, to do that one would have to promote and deliver as well as make money.
So, when such a prediction is made, what does a good Personnel Officer do?
He does the computations outlined in this policy letter and any other that seem indicated and says, “There you are, chums. This is my part of the deal and (presenting a plan) this is how I’ll go about it, to hire, recruit, get trained and apprenticed the needful personnel. Now what are YOU doing about (1) to (q) in this P/L so you don’t stop my progress doing my job of getting you eighty additional, functional, useful, nongoofing, producing staff?”
This wakes up the prediction elsewhere so Personnel’s prediction doesn’t fall down plop.
Once the action is begun, part of the prediction is that it will require continuous guiding, handling and pounding to make it come true.
For instance, it can be predicted that as Personnel loads them in, there will be failures to program, hat, train, apprentice and utilize. One Personnel loaded an org full and a month later fifty-seven nonutilized, nonassigned people were combed out of the debris. “But they are so new.. . .” “But you can’t assign. . . .” etc., etc. And Personnel got blamed for recruiting “unsuitable people.” Because the hatting, training, apprenticing actions were neglected! You can only recruit untrained people, really.
So Personnel regards unutilized people as a backlog on his lines. Recruited not utilized means he still has them as they have not “fed into the org.”
“Prove you have used what I got. Show me the programing of their training. How many have hats? How many are apprenticed?” These are legitimate Personnel questions. And they are demands.
Until utilized, personnel are regarded as still on Personnel’s plate no matter where they’ve gotten to in the org.
Otherwise, Personnel is pounded, pounded for people, people, people when the halls are impassable with nonutilized personnel.
Yet I’ve never heard a Personnel man say, “What’d you do with the guys I got you last week?” It would produce some blushes.
Personnel aren’t personnel really until they are utilized.
Hectic transfers from working posts, “musical chairs,” all come from lack of personnel programs based on predictions.
When programs are made and are in action, a failure to predict probable failures to hat, train, apprentice, post, is a legitimate prediction and should be watched carefully and corrected by Personnel.