One of the greatest opportunities for increasing the efficiency of organisations lies in improving the human resource input. Over a decade ago Likert, in his paper ‘Human resource accounting: building and assessing productive organisations’, maintained that benefits of between20 and 40 per cent can be achieved, if management can be encouraged to channel their efforts in this direction. One of the problems in this approach, however, is to find some reliable means of preliminary diagnosis of the health of the organisation.