University of Virginia Library

How Efficiency and Loyalty of Workers may be Capitalized

Conservation and development of individuality in workers may be made an important factor in creating loyalty as well as in directly increasing efficiency. Great retail stores put many department heads into business for themselves, giving them space, light, buying facilities, clerks, and purchasing and advertising credit as a basis of their merchandising; then requiring a certain percentage of profit on the amount allowed them. The more successful of Marshall Field's lieutenants were taken into partnership and, as in the case of Andrew Carnegie and his "cabinet of young

geniuses," were given substantial shares of the wealth they helped to create.

Some industries and stores carry this practice to the point of making specialized departments entirely independent of the general buying, production, and selling organizations whenever these fall short of the service offered outside; while the principle of stock distribution or other forms of profit sharing has been adopted by so many companies that it has come to be a recognized method of promoting loyalty.

Regard for the employee's personality must be carried down in an unbroken chain through all the ranks. It may be broken at any step in the descent by an executive or foreman who has not himself learned the lesson that loyalty to the house includes loyalty to the men under him.

It is not uncommon, in some American houses, to find three generations of workers—grandfather, father, and apprentice son—rendering faithful and friendly service; or to discover a score of bosses and men who have

spent thirty or forty years—their entire productive lives—in the one organization. Where such a bond exists between employer and employees, it becomes an active, unfailing force in the development of loyalty, not only among the veterans, but also among the newest recruits for whom it realizes an illustration of what true coöperation means.