The bulk of the work in manufacturing and trading enterprises is performed by line personnel. These are precisely those people who build houses, make doors and windows, cast metal, transport goods to shops, sit at the cash register, draw up insurance policies, and also engage in other prestigious, but such necessary activities.
In any organization, the number of these workers is significantly higher than the rest of the staff. This is not surprising, because managers, marketers, merchandisers and other employees are already working with what the linear staff produced. These are the so-called workhorses of all companies.
Unskilled workers
Often the work of this category of personnel is classified as unskilled, since special knowledge is not needed to perform their simple labor functions. This applies to those posts for which a short internship or probationary period is sufficient:
- Cashiers.
- Sellers.
- Operators
- Installers.
- The guards.
To fulfill these responsibilities, enterprises often invite maternity students, senior citizens, or disabled people.
Qualified line staff representatives
However, specialists who have received specialized education and occupy the lowest levels of the hierarchical ladder at the enterprise are also linear personnel. These are employees such as:
- Sales managers.
- Bank employees.
- Doctors
- Teachers.
- Locksmiths, welders, casters and others.
Applicants for such positions are presented with a number of requirements that fit into the framework of their education. Sometimes representatives of the line staff may have difficulties with finding a job, which is due to the young specialist’s lack of experience, recommendations, or simply insufficient knowledge of their specialty.
Difficulties in hiring line staff
Linear personnel in production or in another field are characterized by the highest rates of staff turnover in comparison with other departments of the same enterprises. This is largely due to the extremely low wages paid to such workers. Based on the fact that their work is unskilled (and if there is specialization, qualifications are still at the lowest level), employers are limited to accruing the required minimum. Often at large enterprises there is a system of motivation for active, smart and diligent employees, as well as their promotion on the career ladder.
The result of the functioning of such a system also becomes the fact that line personnel are a link where workers do not stay for long.
Moreover, many job seekers from linear staff initially consider these vacancies as temporary: students work between periods of active study, mothers on maternity decrees are very mobile and can switch to more promising and monetary work at any time.
It is not difficult for an employer to hire an unskilled worker, because there are always enough willing. However, if we are talking about a person who is responsible for his work responsibilities, then the search is much more complicated. As regards hiring workers with specialized knowledge (for example, line personnel at the factory), this task is even more difficult. To close such vacancies, the personnel specialist needs to find a middle ground between unsatisfactory candidates who agree to the declared salary and reliable, responsible applicants who are forced to agree to the employer's offer.
Who and how manages line personnel
An organizational structure designed to manage lower-level employees is called linear management. Its essence is that a head is assigned to each department, reporting to a higher boss. A feature of the system is that each employee in the hierarchy reports directly to his supervisor: he receives tasks or instructions from him, and he is obliged to report only to this person.
The advantage of the vertical management structure is that subordinates are guided by clear interrelated tasks and there are no misunderstandings with the preparation and submission of reports. In addition, the entire vertical functions as a whole.
True, a linear personnel management system imposes additional responsibility on managers and the ability to control all aspects of the production process.
Thus, we can conclude: the decisive role in the production of goods or services belongs to employees who are called “line personnel” (this is someone with low qualifications or without them at all). This category of company employees performs an important part of economic activity, which becomes the basis for the implementation of the labor function of other employees (advertising agents, sales managers, representatives of the transport and accounting departments).