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.