Shop Management

by Frederick Winslow Taylor

In selecting men to be tried as foremen, or in fact for any position throughout the place, from the day laborer up, one of two different types of men should be chosen, according to the nature of the work to be done. For one class of work, men should be selected who are too good for the job; and for the other class of work, men who are barely good enough.

If the work is of a routine nature, in which the same operations are likely to be done over and over again, with no great variety, and in which there is no apparent prospect of a radical change being made, perhaps through a term of years, even though the work itself may be complicated in its nature, a man should be selected whose abilities are barely equal to the task. Time and training will fit him for his work, and since he will be better paid than in the past, and will realize that he has been given the chance to make his abilities yield him the largest return—all of the elements for promoting contentment will be present; and those men who are blessed with cheerful dispositions will become satisfied and remain so. Of course, a considerable part of mankind is so born or educated that permanent contentment is out of the question. No one, however, should be influenced by the discontent of this class.

On the other hand, if the work to be done is of great variety—particularly if improvements in methods are to be anticipated—throughout the period of active organization the men engaged in systematizing should be too good for their jobs. For such work, men should be selected whose mental caliber and attainments will fit them, ultimately at least, to command higher wages than can be afforded on the work which they are at. It will prove a wise policy to promote such men both to better positions and pay, when they have shown themselves capable of accomplishing results and the opportunity offers. The results which these high-class men will accomplish, and the comparatively short time which they will take in organizing, will much more than pay for the expense and trouble, later on, of training other men, cheaper and of less capacity, to take their places. In many cases, however, gang bosses and men will develop faster than new positions open for them. When this occurs, it will pay employers well to find them positions in other works, either with better pay, or larger opportunities; not only as a matter of kindly feeling and generosity toward their men, but even more with the object of promoting the best interests of their own establishments. For one man lost in this way, five will be stimulated to work to the very limit of their abilities, and will rise ultimately to take the place of the man who has gone, and the best class of men will apply for work where these methods prevail. But few employers, however, are sufficiently broad-minded to adopt this policy. They dread the trouble and temporary inconvenience incident to training in new men.

Mr. James M. Dodge, Chairman of the Board of the Link-Belt Company, is one of the few men with whom the writer is acquainted who has been led by his kindly instincts, as well as by a far-sighted policy, to treat his employees in this way; and this, together with the personal magnetism and influence which belong to men of his type, has done much to render his shop one of the model establishments of the country, certainly as far as the relations of employer and men are concerned. On the other hand, this policy of promoting men and finding them new positions has its limits. No worse mistake can be made than that of allowing an establishment to be looked upon as a training school, to be used mainly for the education of many of its employees. All employees should bear in mind that each shop exists, first, last, and all the time, for the purpose of paying dividends to its owners. They should have patience, and never lose sight of this fact. And no man should expect promotion until after he has trained his successor to take his place. The writer is quite sure that in his own case, as a young man, no one element was of such assistance to him in obtaining new opportunities as the practice of invariably training another man to fill his position before asking for advancement.

The first of the functional foremen to be brought into actual contact with the men should be the inspector; and the whole system of inspection, with its proper safeguards, should be in smooth and successful operation before any steps are taken toward stimulating the men to a larger output; otherwise an increase in quantity will probably be accompanied by a falling off in quality.

Next choose for the application of the two principal functional foremen, viz., the speed boss and the gang boss, that portion of the work in which there is the largest need of, and opportunity for, making a gain. It is of the utmost importance that the first combined application of time study, slide rules, instruction cards, functional foremanship, and a premium for a large daily task should prove a success both for the workmen and for the company, and for this reason a simple class of work should be chosen for a start. The entire efforts of the new management should be centered on one point, and continue there until unqualified success has been attained.

When once this gain has been made, a peg should be put in which shall keep it from sliding back in the least; and it is here that the task idea with a time limit for each job will be found most useful. Under ordinary piece work, or the Towne-Halsey plan, the men are likely at any time to slide back a considerable distance without having it particularly noticed either by them or the management. With the task idea, the first falling off is instantly felt by the workman through the loss of his day's bonus, or his differential rate, and is thereby also forcibly brought to the attention of the management.

There is one rather natural difficulty which arises when the functional foremanship is first introduced. Men who were formerly either gang bosses, or foremen, are usually chosen as functional foremen, and these men, when they find their duties restricted to their particular functions, while they formerly were called upon to do everything, at first feel dissatisfied. They think that their field of usefulness is being greatly contracted. This is, however, a theoretical difficulty, which disappears when they really get into the full swing of their new positions. In fact the new position demands an amount of special information, forethought, and a clear-cut, definite responsibility that they have never even approximated in the past, and which is amply sufficient to keep all of their best faculties and energies alive and fully occupied. It is the experience of the writer that there is a great commercial demand for men with this sort of definite knowledge, who are used to accepting real responsibility and getting results; so that the training in their new duties renders them more instead of less valuable.

As a rule, the writer has found that those who were growling the most, and were loudest in asserting that they ought to be doing the whole thing, were only one-half or one-quarter performing their own particular functions. This desire to do every one's else work in addition to their own generally disappears when they are held to strict account in their particular line, and are given enough work to keep them hustling.

There are many people who will disapprove of the whole scheme of a planning department to do the thinking for the men, as well as a number of foremen to assist and lead each man in his work, on the ground that this does not tend to promote independence, self-reliance, and originality in the individual. Those holding this view, however, must take exception to the whole trend of modern industrial development; and it appears to the writer that they overlook the real facts in the case.