What Are Personnel?
People hired by a business or organisation to carry out certain tasks are known as personnel or employees. Employees might range in skill level from highly experienced experts like doctors in hospital to unskilled labourers engaged in daily contract work. Many countries have laws that enforce minimum salaries, safe working conditions, and conduct expectations in an effort to safeguard their labour force.
What Is Personnel Administration?
Personnel administration is the management of employees within an organisation. It includes hiring, training, compensating, and managing the workforce that can efficiently work towards achieving the goals of the organisation. The core of personnel administration is its focus on the well-being of employees as well as the success of the company. It is different from human resource management and involves more administrative work. By using personnel administration, companies can ensure that they hire the right amount of workers, find and nurture top talent, and assign tasks that are appropriate for each employee’s skill level.
Scope Of Personnel Administration
The primary scope of personnel administration is the effective utilisation of the workforce. It ensures effective working relationships among all the members of the organisation. It defines the clear responsibility of the employees for each job. There are various functions of the personnel administration, some of which are listed below:
- Workforce planning: Determining the appropriate number and quality of labour required to achieve the organisation’s objectives is part of the function.
- Job Analysis and Designation: Understanding the requirements of the job and assigning roles accordingly.
- Appraisal: Assessment of the performance of the employee and providing feedback for their improvement.
- Career development: It helps the employee to plan their career within the organisation.
- Employee welfare: Personnel administration is responsible for ensuring a positive working environment.
Types Of Personnel Administration
There are three types of personnel administration functions. They are as follows:
- Strategic personnel administration: Managers strategically study the current recruitment policies and find ways to improve them. It helps to reduce attrition and improve employee productivity. This study helps in determining the hiring needs and long-term staffing requirements. It also includes training of the employees.
- Tactical personnel administration: This team emphasises on identifying, training, and maintaining the best available candidates. It manages employee schedules, allocates resources, designs workflows, and conducts job assessments. This ensures the required staffing level is maintained.
- Operational personnel administration: It helps in carrying out administrative and operational functions. It implements the strategies and measures their impact. It helps to complete the administrative tasks whenever a new employee joins.
What Is Public Personnel Administration?
Public personnel administration is a part of HRM. It is concerned with acquisition, development, utilisation and compensation of a public organisation’s employees. Government offices or non-profit organisations fall under the category of a public entity. This field focuses on civil service, collective bargaining, and affirmative action. These areas relate to how governments and other public companies orient, train, and safeguard their workers.
There are many ways of making a public personnel administration efficient. These are some ways of adequately utilising the workforce:
- Government officials should maintain closer interaction with the citizens. This can help the government to solve many problems. A positive relationship between ministers and government officials is crucial for effective governance.
- Citizens should not only be the recipients of the social welfare programs, they should also actively participate in formulating, implementing, and monitoring plans.
- The media’s role is also crucial in addressing the faults of the public personnel administration. They can also make people aware of the challenges they face in interacting with the administrative staff. It can be increasing people’s participation in administration.
How Does Personnel Administration Work?
There are various functions of this team and it is completed in a stepwise manner.
- Classification is the first step where similar types of posts are grouped. This is done based on their duties and responsibilities. A proper classification plan displays all the classes together with every current job and position. Rules and regulations are then added to this for the purpose of administration, interpretation, and modification.
- Position classification is the second step, that explains the individual position of that role. It gives detailed information about the duties and responsibilities. It clearly states the work scope that an individual has to be accountable for when holding that position.
- The third step is the process of recruitment. Government organisations mainly conduct exams and interviews to choose the right candidate. They establish effective systems for the selection of people and conduct employment campaigns.
- The next step is training. Training develops skills and creates the needed mental attitude and morale of the government officials. It helps them to carry out their daily tasks, adapt to the changing needs, and understand the larger picture of administration. It prepares them to take on new responsibilities.
- The next step is promotion. It is crucial to give timely promotions to the employees to develop their talent and motivate them. This process helps in increasing the pay grade and responsibilities of the employees. This is also helpful in filling a higher position with the available candidates.
- The last step is the pay scales. The salary of the employees is based on several factors. This includes the cost of living, equal pay for equal work, labour market availability, legislation like the Minimum Wages Act, social considerations, and regional variations.
Nature Of Personnel Administration
These are the key characteristics of this department:
- This department is employee-centric, as it works with and for people. It focuses on enhancing employee satisfaction and productivity.
- It is multidisciplinary and works on concepts of many disciplines like psychology, sociology, and economics for managing people well.
- Personnel administration is not a one-time activity, it keeps on working continuously. It keeps on operating as long as the organisation exists.
- It is a pervasive function and is prevalent in all types of organisations.
- The goal of this department is to achieve organisational objectives through efficient management of human resources.
Importance Of Personnel Administration
This team works to increase the effectiveness of the workforce for achieving the goals of the companies. The importance of its functions are:
- Efficiency and productivity: It ensures that employees put their full effort into performing their duties. It gives them the necessary training and development opportunities. It creates a productive workforce.
- Employee satisfaction: It is responsible for addressing employee grievances, maintaining healthy relations with the employees, and ensuring fair compensation. This increases employee satisfaction and retention.
- Organisational goals: With the help of efficient workforce planning, it ensures that the goals are achieved effectively.
- Positive work environment: It focuses on employee welfare and safety to create a positive and healthy working environment.
What Is The Difference Between Personnel Administration And HRM
The goal of personnel administration is to keep and acquire people for the organisation by focusing on operational and administrative duties. This team handles hiring, onboarding, and recruitment. They also fill out and file paperwork for new hires. However, HRM focuses on the individuals inside a firm, meaning that the experts in this field work to support team members in performing their jobs effectively. Creating training programs, giving an abundance of resources, and addressing team members’ issues in order to foster a more positive work atmosphere are always to support professionals in doing their jobs well.
Personnel administration is key to any organisation’s success. It treats employees in a way that allows them to realize their full potential as intrinsic beings and to build an efficient organisation, thereby narrowing the desired gap between organisational and individual goals. It hires employees and over a period of time makes them more valuable to the company. Therefore, we may state that personnel administration is concerned with hiring, assigning, training, disciplining, offering financial and non-financial incentives, and providing retirement benefits to individuals working for an organisation.
