The business of HR is… society

The origins of HR lie in the welfare workers employed by Quaker firms who addressed the lack of social welfare with their own personnel policies. It was good for society and good for them. Novelist and playwright JB Priestley was hugely impressed by the conditions at Cadbury’s Bourneville plant in the 1920s, with its “magnificent recreation grounds, dining rooms, medical attention, works councils, pensions” in a factory “run for private profit”. He concluded that here there was “definite and enormous gain” both for the firm and for society.