If personnel are not programed, you get chaos.

The subject of personnel carries with it always the subjects of training and experience and suitability.

Dept 13 has been created to permit personnel to be “enhanced” or improved.

This is done by programing.

HCO should make known what it will need in the org in the next year. How many of what kind it now has.

Dept 13 must work out what programing is now needed. It posts a board, puts the names on it and sees that part-time study will occur and be followed for the next post. It sees that this will be made.

HCO by looking back over some period of expansion will be able to forecast what will be needed more easily. Anyone in the org is usually aware of the undermanned points that exist and the unfilled posts as they get hit with them continually. So if HCO doesn’t know what these points are by record, it is easy to do a survey.

With an inefficient HCO which has not recruited and programed, the org is already starting well behind the gate and is already howlingly undermanned and undertrained. Yet to solve all this by instantaneous transfers will unmock the lot.

The RIGHT way to do it is to

1. Count up what you have.

2. Figure out where they will be promoted to.

3. Program them on part-time training and

4. Recruit.

5. When recruits are on, get them genned in fast on the lower posts so they can operate.

6. Shift the programed people to the posts for which they have been programed.

7. Begin to train up the recruits with part-time programing.

8. Recruit.

This does not mean you shift every post in the org. It does mean your more experienced people are the ones that go up.

Various rules go with this:

TRY TO KEEP TECH TRAINED PEOPLE IN TECH.

TRY TO TRAIN ADMIN PEOPLE FULLY FOR ADMIN.

There are ways to waste enough training time to crash your org. Train a person to Class VI, put him in Public Divs. Train up a PES and transfer him to tech training. All sorts of goofs can be made in programing, all of them costly to the org, all of them defeating the objects of Personnel Dept 1 and Enhancement Dept 13. One obvious way is to train somebody up with no contract or note. But the main one is not to program at all and just rattle around as a total effect.

Part of the action by Dept 1 is to beat down all the reasons why we can’t hire anyone. I recently reviewed an area where personnel problems were desperate. Five to ten people a week were applying. Only one to two were “suitable,” whatever that meant. That ratio is wrong. Eighty percent unsuitable? Ten percent maybe, not 80%.

The area Dept 13 has to beat down is arranging work so no part-time study can occur. Only about 20% of a staff won’t study. Nearly 90% will handle their post if it’s overloaded rather than study, which is okay. But putting somebody on Day and Foundation and putting one man on a ten thousand name address section to keep it up and in use are the usual reasons for no study time.

This comes together between Dept 1 and Dept 13 AND IS AN INDICATOR THAT DEPT 1 IS GOOFING ITS RECRUITING ACTIONS.

Dept 3, Inspections, or the Executive Secretaries or Secretaries can also foul up both Dept 1 and Dept 13. By not inspecting and not running on and by stats, these salt the org down with idling people. So you see Dept 22, let us say, with six people and no production while the Treasury Sec has to work every night to handle an undermanned Dept 8.

The answer is stats, honest stats for everyone.

You can get a situation where you have enough people in the whole org to run an org but a third are overloaded and the rest dev-ting around. That’s where there is no stat watching and no daily area inspections or executive interest.

I know of one org that has forty-four on staff doing the work and potential service load of about seventy-five. Naturally they can’t take time off to study so they can’t be programed. Yet the stat situation is not watched or used nor is the place inspected so the production is about a twenty-person org and no funds exist to pay forty-four much less seventy-five. The clue is that it’s all manned except for Tech! The customers are there in droves. They can’t get service. So no pay.

It is silly situations like this that occur when personnel are not programed. Two years ago the above org did not train anyone, worked as a clinic and would not even audit staff. All its auditor contracts expired. HCO and the OES sat there in a fog and let it happen. There was no Dept 13 to program anyone.

So here is a new angle to the recruitment problem. HCO is faced with the vital necessity of recruiting trained auditors NOW. Yet at this writing hasn’t even sent around a bulk mailing to ask field auditors to drop in.

So this is where Dept 14 gets into the act. It is a problem in org correction. If even Qual is empty, it’s all an OES function. The correct solution is to force recruitment of trained auditors, force recruitment of ordinary applicants, and program it in Dept 13 to train up new auditors as well.

You should realize that no matter how rough the problem looks, it involves recruitment and programing. Instant transfers can utterly wreck an org. Yet, inevitably, transfer! is all you hear when a solution is required to org production failures.

I think this comes in from the world of “psychology.” Maybe labor unions. If a man isn’t doing well on a post you transfer him. It assumes that each person has “aptitude.” It never changes so you fit the post to the person by finding a new post. That’s really nonsense. You can actually more profitably fit the person to the post.

Only when programing has failed (or doesn’t exist) does one resort to transfers to solve personnel problems. Of course experienced, able people get promoted. But unless they are programed and trained, watch out! He was a fine CF Clerk and a lousy Dissem Sec. Why? It isn’t his personality. It’s that nobody trained him to be a Dissem Sec. He wasn’t programed.

It’s cruel to promote a person and let the guy fall on his head.

Transferring because somebody doesn’t do well is discipline, it is not “adapting people to jobs they can handle.”

There is quite an awful jolt in losing one’s post. Never think there isn’t.

Promote-demote occurs when the person is not programed. Therefore the new Dept 13.

Therefore this Personnel Series.