If personnel are not programed, you get chaos.

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

It is an observation that personnel, by critical definition, is “that function which creates havoc in one place in an org by trying to solve a personnel mess in another.”

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

Example: We have just gotten in our Div 6. It has two people. The org has been suffering for lack of Div 6 actions. Now we’ve finally got two people there and they are being trained up. Meanwhile there is a shortage of staff in CF. Personnel “solves” the CF problem by transferring those in Div 6 to CF in Div 2. There goes any progress on Div 6.

This is done by programing.

By solving one problem, another is created.

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

Also there is the fact that it takes a while to train someone on a post and get the post in order. So rapid transfers defeat any post training or competence.

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.

We call this action “musical chairs.” That is a game in which people rapidly change positions.

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.

So these transfers defeat not only the org on the third dynamic but also the individual on the first dynamic.

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.

An earlier action similar to this went on. Then whenever Tech got an auditor trained up, Personnel would transfer the auditor to an admin post.

The RIGHT way to do it is to

As the auditor was tech trained and not OEC trained, you began to find auditors in charge but they didn’t have any admin training, thus shattering, by ignorance, the org form and defeating the org’s production.

1. Count up what you have.

I’ve just seen a case where a staff member went on full-time training Class VI (very expensive) and was made HCO ES on his return. But had never had an OEC.

2. Figure out where they will be promoted to.

Using the Tech Divs as a “personnel pool” and taking tech people for admin posts thus defeats twice — defeats the org as a producing activity and defeats its form by not training people in admin (OEC) when they are going to be used in admin.

3. Program them on part-time training and

These personnel errors (or crimes) cause every staff member to suffer in terms of lowered income, lowered pay, lowered facilities, lower success. I doubt there is any org where these errors (or crimes) are not current at this writing.

4. Recruit.

To give the HCO ES candidate full-time training on the OEC or FEBC would make sense. Not Class VI! If you reverse it, you’ll see what I mean: we give a new staff member an OEC only and put him onto auditing. Of course that would be disastrous. It’s just as disastrous the other way around — taking an auditor who is a Class VI but not an OEC grad and making him the HCO Area Sec!

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

There is an optimum executive who is both an experienced, trained administrator (OEC and time on org posts) and an auditor. But an org would have to be in high production with lots of auditors before that could happen.

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.

These errors are of long duration. They happen over and over. And they do more to destroy an org than any other action.

8. Recruit.

A. Making a hole in one place to remedy a hole in another

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

B. Training a person for tech but not admin and putting him in admin

Various rules go with this:

C. Using the Tech Divs as personnel pools from which to man other divs

TRY TO KEEP TECH TRAINED PEOPLE IN TECH.

D. Rapid shifts of post

TRY TO TRAIN ADMIN PEOPLE FULLY FOR ADMIN.

E. Leaving areas in an org unmanned.

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 reason why these things are done all come under the heading of failures to recruit and properly train.

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.

Org expansion often gets pinned by false economy in personnel. “If we hired anyone else, we would get less pay.” This completely overlooks the fact that if the org doesn’t hire more people it will go broke. An org has to be of a certain size to be solvent; it has certain basic expenses such as rent which makes it cost just so much to run. Yet personnel can be so poorly thought out that the org is kept at starvation level.

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

I heard one not long ago which takes a prize, “But we don’t need an Advance Registrar. We can’t afford one anyway. You see we have pcs booked in advance for ten weeks already as we don’t have enough auditors, so why should we have any further promotion?” An idiot smile went with this of course. Backlog became “advance registration.”

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.

Orgs in various ways fix their income and prevent its increase. First and foremost of these is personnel.

The answer is stats, honest stats for everyone.

In every org where I have acted as Executive Director, I have had a personnel procurement problem. In each case the problem was internally created. First I would get, “Well, units are low . . .” or “Nobody ever applies.” I would take it from there. I finally became very clever at these impasses. “What,” I would ask the Receptionist, “do you tell people who come looking for a job?” Cunning. “Oh them!” I would get, “I tell them we aren’t hiring of course.” I would set up a line from a specially appointed personnel person to me only and would shortly have enough people. I have run an org from eight people to sixty-three in thirty days and its GI from £50 to £3,000 in sixty days. Just by doing the usual. It created awful problems of course, like auditing rooms, classrooms, hand grooving people onto posts — it was busy. The favorite graveyard calm, so adored there before that, got shattered to hell!

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 concluded many times then and conclude now that it is a characteristic of an org to refuse new personnel and to keep them off. In approaching this problem in an org, I am afraid experience has taught me to begin with that assumption and handle it from that viewpoint.

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.

So I normally set up a line that can’t be stopped and get people on post. Then I force in training on posts. And I personally inspect and talk to every section every day about what they need and how it’s going and keep up their section production.

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.

LRH Comms tell me they cant get execs to inspect their areas daily. And personnel shortages show that others do not blow the lines open on recruiting and even prevent handling.

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 here is one area where I do some things in managing a production org that not many others do:

1. Force recruitment

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.

2. Train on post

3. Daily inspection and comm with everyone in the place in his post area

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.

4. Concentrate on section and individual production

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.

5. Let people finish the job they are on.

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.

The result of all this has uniformly been sky-high stats, sky-high pay, huge reserves and excellent tech produced.

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

So these are the magic solutions.

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

I do NOT empty out tech to fill admin. I do NOT encourage transfers. I do NOT create problems in one area by transferring to another. I will NOT accept that no one applies for jobs. And I don’t wreck one project by grabbing people off it to start another. I FIND NEW PEOPLE.

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.

Behind every “impossibility” lies some great big WHY which if not found keeps things messed up. One area that “couldn’t get any auditors” had expelled 60% of the field from the church! Another area had dismissed 50% of staff every time the income dropped. Another area cut the staffs pay very low and then made it go lower each time the gross income fell. Another “never could find the right people.”

Therefore this Personnel Series.

Sometimes internal squabbles are given a much higher importance than the org itself.

Some areas use “social acceptability” instead of stats to handle personnel.

Whatever the reason an org isn’t getting on, it is internal. It isn’t some other org or some senior management body. It’s right inside that org. Further, it has to do with personnel mishandling.

Any org at any time has not given as much quantity of service as the public demanded. If you continued to expand at the rate of demand, giving very high quality of service mind you, the org would expand to hundreds or even thousands of staff members.

Somewhere, when that doesn’t happen, personnel mishandling has cut off the expansion.

So when we look this over, we find that quality of delivered product determines how much it will be in demand and that the only thing which will limit an expansion to meet that demand is personnel procurement, training and stability on post, getting the staff to produce and holding the form of the org and making it go.

When personnel commits the errors (or crimes) mentioned here and when management fails to do the 1 to 5 listed above that I do in an org, there will be a halt.

True, an org is complex. True, quality is hard to maintain. True, one has to work. But unless personnel procurement and handling is IN, all else will fail. So that’s the weak spot.

An undermanned division will empty.

An undermanned org will pay badly and go down.