The original question was who invented it, and after all this, I must confess that it was me. Some years ago I was bopping in to work when an employee stopped me. The poor soul said that he had asked his supervisor a question and the supervisor would only say that he would get back to him later, he hadn't, and the employee asked if I could help him. I could, so I solved that problem. Later in the day another employee came and said that his supervisor wouldn't let him go to the bathroom. When I asked about breaks he said that the supervisor wouldn't let them have breaks and that he had been "holding it" for six hours. I quickly solved that problem. Then an employee came to me and said that he thought that he wasn't making enough money to work at the company, so I told him that there was a company in Mississippi that would love to hire him, so I solved that problem. When I bopped out of the building at the end of the day there was a huge crowd of employees with signs that said "he's human" and "what a resource" and, voila, the name stuck and spread hither and yon. I tried in vain to keep "personnel" but what can you do?
I was watching the movie "A Few Good Men" last night and at the end of the movie when the 2 marines have found out they are being discharged, A man tells Tom Cruises' character that the marines needed to be taken to "personnel" to complete some paperwork. After he said that I thought about it for a while (and the forum question) and thought how silly it would have sounded in the context of this movie, if he had said "I need to take these young men to the "human resources department" to complete their discharge paperwork. I guess "personnel" is either still used by the military or at least in the hollywood version of the military either way, it sounds better in a serious movie like this. Thought it was an interesting side note to this discussion, especially since this movie was made in the '90's.
Actually I was having a tough week when I wrote that description but it also took into consideration alot of the "war stories" (boy, thats a phrase that just doesn't sound right these days) from all of you.
According to one of my teachers in college, it was changed to Human Resource (I don't know when because I remember in the 70 it was personnel) because business came to see employees as a resource of the company just like all other company resources that have value. They began to realize the cost of human capital when employees left, etc. and factor it into the cost of running the business; thus human resources instead of just personnel.
Comments
Don, if I even LOOK at my husband a certain way, he thinks he has a chance to get lucky..and there goes my sleep. Must be a newlywed thing..
Happy St. Patty's Day!
April
Thanks for the tall one, just the same.
Paul
Valentine
:-)