... Good Job Design
A friend of mine, a mid-level manager, was almost salivating over the economies of computerized word processing.
“You know what I’d do?” he said of an office where he’d worked. “I’d take out just about all the secretaries and dump them into a central office. I’d reduce their salaries. They’d be doing less demanding work and should be paid less.” He wasn’t an ogre. He was reflecting the thinking of a good many modern managers. It makes sense, doesn’t it, turning offices into factories, which, indeed, might run twenty-four hours a day, to make the best use of equipment?
Well, not quite. In fact, not at all. Nor should you try obnoxious gimmicks like computerized pacing.
They’re all threats to good job design, which is nothing more than sensibly deciding what each job includes and how the employee does it.
Consider typing pools—er, centralized word-processing operations. If not passé, they at least deserve to be; most, anyway. Employees’ salaries keep rising, even with slowed-down inflation, while the price of computers is falling. By the end of this decade an average worker’s salary may exceed $20,000 annually. And yet micros and dedicated word processors will easily cost less than several thousand dollars. Even now, for a typical business, Barry says, centralized word processing simply doesn’t pay; it tears the employee away from his or her boss and harms the managers’ own work. Executives must vie with other offices of a company for the word processors’ time. They can’t effortlessly set their own priorities. And quality is more of a problem, too, because, as Barry notes, “someone in centralized word processing won’t normally get hell for not catching an error. I expect my secretary to challenge anything she’s not certain about. For instance, my secretary will come in and say, ‘You left such-and-such person off the list of people receiving the memo.’ Which matters. Often who a memo goes to matters as much as what’s in the memo.”
And what about the question of knowing which calls to put through to the boss? Around the time Barry and I talked, he was obsessed with a paper projecting the World Bank’s office needs for the next twenty-five years. He didn’t have to tell his secretary of the importance of any call about the paper. She knew. For she’d been helping him put it together.
“It isn’t a question anymore of the efficient use of the machines,” Barry says in recommending the traditional secretary over the pool arrangement. “It’s effective use of the people. It’s like the phone. Even if people use the phone just twice a day for business, we still give them their own. We don’t put all the phones in one room, do we?”
You may disagree with Barry and still insist that central word processing is the most efficient use of both equipment and people; and maybe your company’s size, economics, or policy will allow nothing else. But if so, be prepared for more job complaints. Shut off from the outside world, perhaps in a windowless, poorly ventilated room, the pool members may feel like Dickensian factory hands. And the claustrophobia may not just be physical. With no one around but others in drudge jobs and their immediate supervisors, the workers feel cut off from chances for advancement. They become obsessed with their immediate surroundings and may be more apt to notice shortcomings of their equipment. “You look at studies of typing pools,” says Waters, “and you’ll find they may actually get in the way of productivity. More workers hate their jobs, and they’re more likely to dislike their equipment, feel backaches, other pains.” He says that sick leave, deservedly or not, may increase.
A gray-haired word processor in Manhattan said she disliked even “clusters,” which were smaller and presumably more pleasant than a giant typing pool in a back room. She missed the “pretty cozy relationship” she enjoyed as secretary to one executive.[[35]]
“He might send me uptown to return a blouse that didn’t fit his wife. So he couldn’t very well tell me not to make personal calls. Not that I stayed on the phone all day. My job was to get his work out, which included staying late if I had to. He appreciated me. And I expected to stay with him till he retired.”
Responding to consultants’ recommendations, however, her company one day offered her three choices. She could work as a mere administrative assistant, join a word-processing operation, or quit. So she forsook the familiar typewriter for a Wang. “Ah,” she reflected, “when I think of those years of correction tape, white-out, retyping!”
Then, continuing her remarks to writer Barbara Garson, she added: “I want you to take this down: I love my Wang. It’s not the machine that gave me the shaft.”
What, then, did?
“Straight typing, seven hours a day,” said the word processor. “That’s the shaft.”
Like Barry, she criticized the quality of work from word-processing pools—or the lack of it.
“The worst thing,” she said, “is when things come by me with wrong spelling, wrong information. Sometimes I think I should correct it. I did at first. But that’s not how they judge me.” It’s by the number of keystrokes. “So why should I take time to correct their work? And why should I stay two minutes past lunch if they’re timing me that way?”
Michael Smith, however, makes a good case for careful, sensitive monitoring.
“Management would be foolish,” he said, “if they didn’t monitor performance. It’s what you do with the monitoring that counts. If you use it in a negative way, that hurts performance. It might improve it for a minute or a half hour while you were watching them, but it might hurt in the long run.” He recommends, instead, systems that give the workers themselves “direct, immediate feedback. The faster the better.”
Joan’s old insurance company, shortly after she left in 1982, started a monitoring system in offices across the country. Some of her ex-colleagues found it more palatable than a simple keystroke count.
Every six months it adjusted their job levels and salaries. And production—the number of health claims processed—was just 30 percent in the formula. Accuracy was another 30. The remainder of the formula plugged in attendance and supervisors’ observations on job knowledge and the quality of correspondence. The employees weren’t just at the mercy of a machine.
“It’s a more equitable system,” said a claims processor whose salary leaped from $220 to more than $280 a week.
Still, the union claimed that most members weren’t so well disposed to the new system. That may or may not have been true. Just the same, the claims processor qualified her own enthusiasm. She wanted faster feedback from the monitoring. “It would be constructive,” she said, “if we got it at the end of the day or even weekly.”
The woman, too, hoped to know the exact math behind the salary system: “I’ve asked my manager a number of times. She said, ‘You wouldn’t understand it.’ I said, ‘Tell it to me, and I will understand it.‘”
Big questions persisted. Was the insurance company, for instance, really crediting her extra for writing letters to doctors who haven’t submitted diagnoses with claims? The company told her that it was—that it still paid to handle such cases. But she wasn’t so sure. Management, she claimed, had lied on other matters.
Another worker said the company did not audit enough forms to discourage slipshod work from high producers.
Even in its first few weeks, with the normal start-up wrinkles, the system did show some promise. Production was dramatically up. “If I was a manager and my job was to get the maximum amount of work out of an employee,” said a claims processor, a union member, “yeah—in that position I’d use it.” But she worried, justifiably, about her own future. “Maybe a person has been producing ninety claims a day. How much more can they push them?[them?] They can’t push them past a hundred, so what else is there for them to do?
“There aren’t many [promotion] opportunities here because supervisors have been here for years and years,” she said. And she wondered: What about turnover?
It was winter 1982. A depression or near depression was in full swing. Would the system have worked well in normal times?
Moreover, how much of a trade-off existed between the claims processors’ productivity and health? NIOSH studied 130 occupations in the 1970s and found that clerical workers were second highest in illnesses like coronary heart disease. Also, many of the women in Joan’s former insurance office had children and blue-collar husbands, and a Massachusetts study showed that women in such families suffered nearly double the heart-disease rate of their husbands. And in Joan’s office, did health insurance claims—for her coworkers’ own ills—cancel out some of the productivity increases? Moreover, how about the moral issue? Suppose the monitoring system taxes the employees’ health for short-term gains; isn’t it almost the same as if the company were belching carcinogens into the air?
If you’re working in a low-level clerical job without control over your fate, you’re a good heart-attack candidate, according to R. A. Karasek, a professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University.[[36]] He cites studies showing that people in “strain occupations” may show twice as much “definite and suspected myocardial infarction and angina pectoris.”
Computerized pacing can increase the stress and health risks. Smith says it’s rarely if ever the answer in white-collar work, not even mail sorting—nothing “involving letters, letters, and so on. It doesn’t improve efficiency because there are a lot of errors.” Pacing isn’t just monitoring, after all. The work is electronically moving past the worker as if it’s on a factory conveyer belt. Think of all the lemons Detroit put on the road in its eagerness for new production records. “With older workers the error rate isn’t as high,” Smith says of white-collar jobs paced by machines. “Maybe it has to do with the nervousness of young people. Older workers always report more job satisfaction. They become used to the drudgery. It’s a hell of a way to put it, but that’s what happens.” Not that many older workers love machine pacing, either.
So, in a large, factorylike office, what’s a happy compromise between lax discipline and mechanized martinets?
You might try participatory monitoring.
Hear employees’ suggestions for a fair monitoring system. You needn’t agree. Just listen. Your people may know of complications you wouldn’t consider in arriving at your production goals; and you may also get a better inkling of how long it will take for people and machines to adjust to each other.
Also, setting goals, keep remembering that tasks vary. Don’t let your monitoring system penalize people, for instance, who fill out forms more complicated than other workers‘.
Keep your commitment to quality. Be willing to give employees some time away from arduous work at the tube. It’s a good way to reduce expensive errors. And tube breaks might not cost you that much in the end. Can you, for instance, design your people’s jobs to use them fully while limiting their time in front of the screens? Maybe you can’t. Perhaps, with thorough computerization, there aren’t many off-line jobs left. But try. Maybe, for instance, some data-entry clerks, showing high motivation, can work part time in low-level telephone sales. The clerks won’t feel so trapped; and you may discover some top-flight talent.
Ask your employees for their ideas. Who says every tube break absolutely has to be a work break?
Plan, however, for breaks of one kind or another. NIOSH favors breaks “of at least fifteen minutes every two hours” for moderately heavy terminal work and the same breaks every[every] hour for workers in the most demanding, repetitive tasks. A British labor group even suggests structuring the workday so that people spend no more than half of it at the terminal. You might chafe under those restrictions—many American companies would—but don’t scoff at your own people’s ideas on breaks as long as they do the work.
Here again, think about the Canary-in-the-Mine Theory of Labor Relations; do not tune out the complainers: do not misplace machismo.