Definition: Personnel management is an organizational function that includes recruiting, hiring and assisting an entity’s workforce. It involves the administration of the institution’s human resource from a transactional standpoint.
What Does Personnel Management Mean?
This is an strategic area when it comes to business development since hiring the right staff is essential to build a healthy growing company. This area includes activities like recruiting, assessing, hiring, training and also other more complex endeavors like career development, payroll, performance assessments and in some cases, job safety. Nevertheless, in modern times, what was known in the past as the Personnel Department has been transitioned to newly conceived Human Resources Departments or Talent Management Departments, where there’s a leadership component that was previously absent, since Personnel areas were more transactional than transformational.
Human Resources Departments are now more employee-development oriented than just plain management of work affairs. In this regard, there are still some places where the Personnel function is viewed as a merely administrative role where payroll, hiring and work issues that may arise are handled. A shift towards a more holistic approach appears to be unstoppable and personnel management as it is currently know might disappear soon.
Example
Mr. Romero is a Machine Operator that works for a metal refining company. The company is a little bit old-school to some extent, since they still employ obsolete organizational structures to manage its internal processes. Currently, Mr. Romero’s wife appears to need a surgical intervention to extract a liver tumor. Among the employee’s benefits there is a medical HMO where her wife is an affiliate. Normally, under modern procedures, Mr. Romero would create the requirement online to apply for the insurance coverage.
Nevertheless, the Personnel Department informed Mr. Romero that he needed to fill a physical written form and submit it to them before he could apply for the coverage. This Department hasn’t been automated and still works with paper forms instead of digital ones. This has caused discomfort among the workforce but top management doesn’t seem to be willing to change these methods. Nevertheless, after the written form was filled, the insurance coverage was activated and her wife could submit herself under the required medical procedure.
