Nowadays appropriate management of human resources is rightly considered as one of the most important parameters for running a successful organisation, but this of course was not always so. Ruthless exploitation of human resources to garner abnormal profits had been a distinguishing feature in a major portion of human civilisation till now.
Even as late as the early part of the twentieth century, the condition of workers, by and large, even in formal sectors, were far from ideal as they were saddled with long working hours, less wages and often with unhygienic working conditions.
One of the pioneering figures who made human resource attain its due importance and respect in management was George Elton Mayo, a globally renowned psychologist, who is being widely regarded as the father of human resource management. He was born on 26th December 1880, in Adelaide, Australia and is being credited for making noteworthy contributions to various disciplines, which includes industrial sociology, business management, philosophy, and social psychology.
Mayo’s work led to the basis of the human relations movement in management. Mayo’s groundbreaking work in Hawthorne Studies, which were conducted at the General Electric Company in Chicago, in the mid-1920s, led to the foundation of the human relations movement in management.
Mayo challenged the then prevailing views of management which believed that workers were only motivated by pay and perks. However, Mayo’s insights made businesses realise the humane, often non quantifiable needs of employees too.Today Mayo’s insightful findings very much influence the HR policies of several organisations around the world.
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Changing Work Environment
Mayo’s theories of human resource were based on scientific methods. He and his team did studies to trace the effect of fatigue and monotony on job productivity and how to control them through varying rest breaks, work hours, temperature and humidity.
One of Mayo’s earliest research pertaining to human resources involved workers at a Philadelphia textile mill, which was suffering a high rate of turnover. Mayo arrived at the thought that the repetitive nature of work in the spinning department at the mill was giving rise to mental abnormalities among the workforce. He prescribed the introduction of rest periods to help reduce turnover.
Mayo, who was appointed to the Harvard Business School (HBS) as a Professor of Industrial Research in 1926, developed his human resource management theories through his observations of employee productivity levels under varying environments. His management insights showed that employees are more motivated by relational factors, like personal attention and camaraderie, than by financial incentives or environmental conditions.
Besides Financial Factors
His research also unearthed the role of informal organisational structures in organisations besides the formal structure and deciphered that job satisfaction, working conditions, job design and morale significantly influenced productivity at workplaces. Mayo was among the firsts to give a human dimension to productivity.
It would not be an overstatement to say that Mayo first showed to the corporate world the immense importance of social and psychological factors in the workplace towards motivating employees. He also put forward that businesses should take into account the social and emotional needs of employees. Social and psychological factors are now very much relevant in drafting HR policies for employees, in the formal corporate world.
Increased Communication and Engagement
Mayo also put forward the idea that increasing communication and engagement between managers and workers can pave the way to higher productivity of workers, which in turn opens the room for participative management practices. From Mayo, management in today’s and tomorrow’s corporate world can learn to have more communication and engagement between managers and workers, which has the potential to translate into enhancement in profits for the business.
Following Mayo’s principles, today’s and tomorrow’s HR Managers can make the workers more emotionally invested in their companies. And an employee who is emotionally invested in a company is expected to have an enduring journey with the company, which in turn can benefit the company as a whole in the long-run.
Work Groups
Mayo also gave importance to the informal work groups, which the management can use for the benefit of the organisation. Mayo’s studies did arrive at the conclusion that productivity partly depended on the informal social patterns of interaction between the work groups.
He put forward the idea that managers who know the nature of informal ties among workers can make decisions for the benefit of the management.
The Art of Interviewing
Mayo gave much importance to interviewing of potential personnel, which today’s HR Managers can imbibe to attain success. In fact, he laid some ground rules for interviewing.
He believed in giving full attention of the interviewer to the person being interviewed and also making it evident through the action/s of the interviewer. He also gave more emphasis to listening than talking, on the part of the interviewer. He advised that the interviewer should not only listen to what the interviewee wanted to say but also to what he did not want to say and what he couldn’t say without help. He was against arguing with and giving advice to the interviewee, during the interview process.
These and other simple but effective rules for interviewing for industrial interviewers did set a template and have been influential even today.
