About Workforce

Workforce

Workforce is an American business magazine and media brand for human resources professionals, listed with Chicago as its home in this directory and published today at workforce.com. Its lineage begins in 1922 as The Journal of Personnel Research, continues through its long years as Personnel Journal, and arrives at the Workforce and Workforce Management titles under which modern readers know it. That unbroken century of publication makes it one of the oldest continuously published human resources periodicals in the United States, and its history is close to a history of the HR profession itself: the magazine was present when personnel work was a new idea, and it chronicled every major reinvention of how organisations hire, pay, train, manage and part with their people.

Unlike a general business magazine, Workforce has always written for a defined professional reader — the senior HR executive responsible for workforce decisions in large organisations. Its subject is people as a business question: how workforce strategy affects results, costs, law and culture. Print publication continued until 2020, after which the brand carried on digitally, and its awards programmes and rankings, built up over three decades, remain among the most recognisable parts of its identity.

1922: The Journal of Personnel Research and the Birth of a Field

Workforce traces its founding to 1922, when The Journal of Personnel Research began publication. The timing matters. American workers were moving from fields to factories, industrial organisations were growing to unprecedented scale, and businesses were learning, often painfully, the complexities of managing large numbers of people. A journal devoted to personnel research announced that managing people could be studied systematically rather than handled by instinct alone. The magazine's own anniversary history describes 1922 as the moment the fledgling field of personnel was officially born, with the journal as one of its founding documents.

From that research-oriented start, the title evolved into Personnel Journal, a name it carried for much of the twentieth century and the name under which generations of personnel managers knew it. The later changes to Workforce and Workforce Management were not cosmetic; each renaming registered a shift in how the profession described itself, from personnel administration to human resources to strategic workforce management. Few periodicals anywhere can show their profession's changing self-image simply by listing their own former titles.

A Mirror of the American Workplace

To mark its 80th anniversary in the early 2000s, Workforce produced a special project chronicling 80 events that had shaped HR, drawn from its own coverage across eight decades. The premise behind that project — that the magazine had served as a mirror of the U.S. workplace and a bellwether for HR — is a fair summary of its editorial role. Labour movements, wartime mobilisation, the growth of employee benefits, civil rights and employment law, the rise of the information-age workplace: each transformed the personnel function, and each passed through the magazine's pages as practical problems for its readers.

That mirroring function is what distinguishes a durable trade publication from a disposable one. Workforce did not merely report HR news; it accumulated an institutional memory for a profession whose practitioners are often too busy with immediate demands to keep their own history. Its editors have repeatedly framed the magazine's purpose in human terms as well as managerial ones — the insistence, voiced by its longtime publisher Margaret Magnus, that human resources fundamentally deals with human nature and strives to bring out the best in everyone, captures the tone the brand tried to hold even while writing about costs, compliance and performance.

The Croft Family Era: A Family Enterprise

For most of its history, Workforce was a family enterprise, a fact its own histories emphasise as little-known but central. Arthur C. Croft bought the publication in the late 1930s, beginning a family stewardship that lasted for more than six decades. His niece, Betty Hartzell, served as publisher of Personnel Journal from 1974 to 1990. She was succeeded by her daughter, Margaret Magnus, who became publisher and president of the owning company, ACC Communications, and led the title into its Workforce era.

Family ownership shaped the magazine's character. A family-run trade title could take a long view, invest in reader relationships and awards programmes whose value built slowly, and maintain an editorial identity independent of the quarterly pressures that govern larger media groups. When readers and contributors dealt with Workforce across the Magnus years, they were dealing with a publication whose publisher's family had owned it since before the Second World War — a continuity almost unheard of in American magazine publishing, and one the magazine itself cited with pride at its 80th anniversary.

What Workforce Covered and Who It Served

Workforce wrote for senior human resources executives and C-level leaders making workforce management decisions, principally at the largest American corporations, while its online content addressed a broader HR audience. Its features characteristically began from a business problem — how to staff, reward, develop or restructure a workforce — and examined how leading organisations had managed it, with the explicit premise that there is no more critical element to a business and its success than its employees. Most stories were written by its own staff, with contributions from sister publications, and the magazine worked with a small, established group of freelance contributors who understood its specific audience.

Its practical apparatus matched that mission. Alongside the monthly magazine stood a weekly email newsletter, Workforce Week, and a twice-monthly advice format, Dear Workforce, which provided a forum for expert answers to practitioners' questions. Its contributor guidelines stressed timely, news-driven stories offering insight into how HR leaders could do their jobs as strategic leaders rather than administrators — HR focused on business results, not HR for its own sake, in the magazine's own formulation of its stance.

The Optimas Awards and a Culture of Recognition

In 1991, Workforce established the Optimas Awards, which became one of its signature institutions. The awards recognise outstanding HR initiatives that drive bottom-line business results — programmes in areas such as recruiting, training, benefits, workforce planning and organisational change that can demonstrate a measurable contribution to the organisation. For HR departments, whose work is often invisible when it succeeds, an Optimas Award offered external validation from the profession's own magazine of record.

The awards also served the magazine editorially, generating a yearly harvest of documented case studies in effective people management that Workforce could report in depth. That reciprocal relationship — recognition in exchange for access to real programmes and real numbers — is a classic trade-press model, and Workforce sustained it for decades. The Optimas name became so embedded in the brand that later owners retained and promoted the programme as a central asset.

GameChangers and the Workforce 100

Workforce extended its recognition programmes in the 2010s. The GameChangers Awards, run from 2011 to 2019, honoured emerging talent and innovative practitioners reshaping the field, complementing the Optimas focus on organisational programmes with attention to individuals. In 2014, the brand launched the Workforce 100, a ranking of the companies with the best HR performance, which gave Workforce a data-driven annual benchmark to set alongside its narrative case studies.

Together, these programmes trace the profession's own priorities in miniature: first, prove that HR initiatives produce business results; then, identify the people changing the field; then, rank organisational excellence systematically. A magazine that began in 1922 as a research journal had become, by its tenth decade, an arbiter that measured and ranked the profession it had helped create — a role only possible for a title with its longevity and standing among senior practitioners.

The Crain Communications Decade

In July 2002, Crain Communications acquired Workforce from ACC Communications, ending the Croft family's more than 40 years — in full, more than six decades — of ownership. The sale became effective on 19 July 2002. Crain, the Detroit- and Chicago-centred publisher of business titles including Pensions and Investments and Business Insurance, presented the acquisition as a natural fit, citing shared family-owned philosophies and the overlap between Workforce's HR readership and the audiences for its pensions, investments and employee benefits publications.

At the acquisition, Workforce was a monthly magazine covering HR news, trends and analysis for about 47,500 human resource executives, with some 275,000 registered online subscribers — figures that show how substantial its digital presence already was in 2002. Margaret Magnus remained as publisher under Crain, reporting within Crain's HR group, and the publication's top management and roughly 20 full-time employees were retained. Its headquarters at that time remained in Costa Mesa, California; the brand's association with Chicago in this directory reflects the Crain and later MediaTec publishing geography that followed. Under Crain, Workforce sat alongside Staffing Industry Analysts, acquired in 2003, as part of a broader human-resources information group.

MediaTec, Redesign and the 91st Year

In January 2013, MediaTec Publishing acquired Workforce Management from Crain Communications, and in August 2013, in the magazine's 91st year, MediaTec announced a major redesign to take effect with the September issue. The overhaul had been planned from the due-diligence stage of the acquisition and was built on an extensive readership survey conducted in October 2012. MediaTec's president and editor-in-chief, Norman B. Kamikow, framed the redesign around how executive readers actually consumed information, while insisting on the continuing importance of the print publication as the basis for the brand's web, newsletter, events and lead-generation activities.

The redesign also brought a blue-ribbon editorial advisory board of senior HR executives from organisations including IBM, BAE Systems, Sodexo, General Mills, Lowe's and DreamWorks, together with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, joined by academic and practitioner voices such as Dave Ulrich of the University of Michigan. Recruiting serving executives from that calibre of employer signalled MediaTec's intention to keep the title aimed squarely at the top of the profession, even as the economics of print trade publishing grew harder.

From Print Magazine to Digital Brand

Workforce's print magazine circulated until 2020, closing a print run of 98 years from the founding of The Journal of Personnel Research. The brand did not close with the print edition. It continues at workforce.com as a digital publication covering HR news, trends and analysis for the same professional audience, carrying forward the name, the awards heritage and the archive of a title that began when personnel research itself was new.

That transition mirrors the profession's own migration online, and the magazine had prepared for it earlier than most: a quarter of a million registered online subscribers already in 2002, newsletters in multiple formats, and an events and lead-generation business built around the print core. In retrospect, the print magazine's final two decades were a long, managed migration of a loyal professional readership from paper to screen, directed successively by a family owner, a national business publisher and a specialist trade publisher.

Legacy: A Century Alongside a Profession

Workforce's claim on attention is ultimately its simultaneity with its subject. Human resources as a recognised management function and Workforce as its magazine grew up together: the journal of 1922 helped define personnel work, Personnel Journal served its mid-century institutionalisation, and Workforce and Workforce Management addressed its strategic, data-conscious modern form. Its family era, its Crain decade, its MediaTec redesign and its digital continuation each preserved that thread.

For readers of this directory, the practical summary is simple. Workforce is the modern name of a Chicago-associated American HR magazine founded in 1922, formerly The Journal of Personnel Research and Personnel Journal, published in print until 2020 and continuing online, known for executive-level coverage of workforce management and for the Optimas Awards, the GameChangers Awards and the Workforce 100. A brand that has published under three names for more than a hundred years does not need to exaggerate its standing: the dates alone establish it as one of the founding institutions of American HR media.