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.