ADMINISTRATION: PERIODIC AUDIT OF PROGRESS 
Progress in the art of personnel administration has been charac- 
terized by an increasing effort to employ objective measurements to 
indicate, by comparison with accepted norms, what are the results 
obtained from pursuing certain policies and practices. Some years 
ago when a centralized employment department was the mark of 
advanced procedure for attacking personnel problems, the rate of 
labor turnover was generally considered the ideal index of the “labor 
situation.” Improvements have been introduced in the method of 
measuring labor turnover, or “labor mobility,” as some prefer to 
describe the set of facts observed, and more and more attention has 
been given to the classification and weighting of its causes. But, 
however computed and with all its refinements, the rate of labor turn- 
over can be regarded no longer as an adequate single index for judging 
the wisdom either of particular personnel practices or of the general 
personnel policy. 
DIFFICULTIES OF EVALUATING PERSONNEL POLICIES 
In isolated instances where little progress has been made, where 
foremen still hire their subordinates and exercise supreme authority 
over their advancement, discipline, and dismissal, a marked reduction 
in labor turnover may be expected to follow the centralization of these 
functions. But where such centralized control has long been estab- 
lished, the slight fluctuations in labor turnover, attributable as they 
are to so many diverse causes, tell very little as to the wisdom of 
continuing or abandoning any specific practices. The value of particu- 
lar methods for reducing accidents, for instance, cannot be shown by 
the rate of labor turnover; the rate of accidents from the causes which 
the methods in question were designed to remove must be observed. 
The wisdom of giving employees vacations with pay, of reducing the 
hours of work, of subjecting applicants to physical examinations or 
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