The Employment Manager and the General Officers
The employment officer comes into a business organization as a staff man, to relieve the general executives. The general executive is a correlator. He is a balancer of claim against claim. His business is to define the general aims and to harmonize all lesser activities with them. To do this work well, he must be supplemented by specialists who do not have a wide range of functions, and so can concentrate upon some special phase and, upon demand, can furnish him with detailed knowledge and standardized special agencies.
The line executive in war determines where a battery shall go and what it shall do, but he depends upon staff men to breed a reliable artillery horse, to design convenient gun carriages, and to prepare service tables for sighting guns. In industry, the function of staff departments is already understood with reference to mechanical equipments. The general executive decides to construct a factory or a warehouse; but he depends upon an architect to design a building which will resist the probable stresses. He desires a product; but he organizes a designing department and an inspection department to control the dimensions of parts. He would not pretend to a mastery of all the sciences involved. The analogy between the function of the purchasing agent in a modern organization and that of the employment manager is close. Formerly, factory foremen thought they knew best how to purchase raw materials. The development of the purchasing agent proved the fallacy of this, since his testing laboratory and specialized knowledge made the results far superior to those obtained by the individual foremen. This principle of staff service is now being carried over into the field of human administration. General executives demand well-chosen men, men who are physically examined and pronounced safe for the work they are to do, men who are properly paid, and men who are so handled that they become permanent, contented, and loyal co-operators in the general plans of the enterprise. Of all the standardized agencies which a service department can put at the disposal of a general executive, the supreme one is a first-class man.
When it is recalled that the general superintendent of a modern factory is responsible for general supervision of the purchase, repair, and use of equipment; for the purchase, testing, storage, and accounting of materials; for shop schedules, promises of delivery, and measurement of output; for cost estimates, inspection of product, tool accounting, and all production orders, it can readily be seen that he has little time or energy to consider the interests of the workers in other than a very general way. There is some excuse for his looking upon men as merely the tools of production. With such an administrative blockade already existing, even in small businesses, there has intervened in recent decades the enormous growth of American corporations. This growth has so overwhelmed executives with functions, and so regimented each class in industry by itself, that officers and wage earners have been swept apart, and the friendly elbow-touch of the earlier day of small shops entirely destroyed. The effort is now being made to build a bridge between employer and employed—the chief span in this bridge is the employment department.