ABSTRACT
competent, experienced and fair dealing by management with the workers in each undertaking is essential for the establishment and maintenance of sound industrial relations, and it must permeate the whole heirarchy of management from charge hands and foremen to top level directorate. Each person who gives instructions to others about their work, about what shall be done, how it shall be done, and the conditions under which it is done, bears his share of responsibility for personnel relations, and this responsibility rests upon all ranks of management including those in large and medium-sized undertakings where people are appointed for personnel work as a specialized function. Personnel management, which includes the management of office, technical, and supervisory staff as well as of manual workers, is as old as industry, commerce, and public administration. Organization is necessary wherever people work together, and this implies management. Only in the last three or four decades, however, have the human problems of industrial organization been systematically studied and personnel management developed as a specialized function in many progressive undertakings. Formerly, the head of a works handled staff and labour problems along with his many other responsibilities, and similarly each manager and foreman within their own departments dealt with all aspects of labour organization while also controlling material and technical aspects of production. This is, indeed, the method still in operation in most firms, but the number of firms is increasing in which the chief executive and his departmental managers and foremen are assisted by a personnel officer and staff specialized in human aspects of industry. These specialists give their whole time to personnel problems, they advise the chief executive on personnel policy, and co-ordinate the application of this policy uniformly throughout the undertaking. Often they are also responsible for administering certain activities which primarily concern personnel, for example, employment, welfare, canteens, education. The change in attitude towards the human factor in industry is due partly to insistence by workpeople on better treatment and conditions than those tolerated in the past. Spread of education and democracy have led to the necessity for winning the confidence of the workers and securing their goodwill. Such relations, combined with suitable incentives, continuity of employment, provision of welfare facilities, and safeguards for health are necessary not as expressions of paternalism or merely to satisfy humanitarian standards, but they pay by leading to greater efficiency.
