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Article on the Personnel division of a business
PERSONNEL: by Diane M. Hoffmann A company's most valuable assets are its employees. We referred to "Gold Collar" workers above. In that book, the author says that businesses are suffering from a "brain drain" because their best and brightest workers feel underutilized and frustrated and therefore are leaving in large numbers. It says that businesses in the post-industrial age have mismanaged their most important resource - people. According to the author, brainpower is to the Information Age what iron, coke, and oil were to the Industrial Age. Gold-Collar Workers are a new breed that demand a new kind of management. They are intelligent, independent, innovative and incredibly valuable. When a company is fortunate enough to have one of these come its way, it should be prepared to recognize it, harness it and value it highly. These people are problem-solvers, imaginative and original. They are capable of motivating and managing themselves and others. They are not docile and obedient. Their work must be challenging, not repetitious. They expect to be actively involved in decisions that affect their work and simply do not respond well to traditional top-down management. Often, they know more than their bosses. The key is to recognize every employee on their individual basis. Get to know them and set them in the context of who they are, where they come from, what they know, what they've done. It is amazing how people hire individuals and never look at their résumé again. They forget what interested them about the applicant in the first place. They forget what education they have, where they're coming from - like the senior manager who looked at his employee's card, as he left the company, and surprisingly said, "Ph.D.?" It was on the résumé when he applied for the job.
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