The Time for Fixing Work is Now!
The time for fixing work is now, and smart leaders realize the need to create a competitive work product - jobs that address our intrinsic human needs for meaning, autonomy, and feedback.
“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is
the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
Theodore Roosevelt
At its best, work allows us to live up to our full potential and gives us a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and growth. We can use our talents to contribute to something important that is bigger than ourselves. Work can make us feel miserable, powerless, and useless at its worst.
According to Peter Drucker, a renowned management consultant and author who established the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory, making work productive and achieving for the worker are part of the tasks of management (defining purpose and mission), and managing social impacts and responsibilities are the other two. What does this mean? It is simple. If you are a manager, designing work is your job. Whether you assign tasks and resources, define roles and responsibilities, or decide to implement a new system, you make conscious and unconscious work design decisions.
However, if you are a typical manager who receives very little formal training on how to do that, you are at a disadvantage. As a result, you might be missing out on an enormous opportunity to achieve a rare triple-win: improving productivity, employee motivation, and customer experience - at the same time.
Realizing the triple win requires an integrated approach to work design that aligns the interests of three critical stakeholders: customers, employees, and managers. It requires a paradigm shift that replaces the mental models and management frameworks developed for a bygone industrial era with new models that meet the needs of a knowledge era, where you hope your most valuable assets return to work tomorrow.
The industrial model has run its course. Dividing the overall ‘job to be done’ into many small tasks has left us with complex processes, excessive specialization, countless handoffs, disengaged employees, and unclear accountabilities. While this approach seems to deliver impressive cost savings on paper, those gains are lost by hidden cost increases elsewhere:
Cost of turnover
Many companies woefully underestimate the actual cost of turnover because they are hidden and rarely quantified. However, experts estimate the real cost of turnover to range from 100-300% of the displaced employees’ salary.
Cost of disengagement
Year after year, Gallup’s engagement surveys reveal that on average, only a third of employees feel engaged. The rest is either not engaged or actively disengaged.
Research shows that disengaged employees cause 60% more errors and defects in work performance, whereas engaged teams exhibit 17% higher productivity and 41% lower absenteeism.
Cost of control
An unfortunate by-product of creating highly fragmented jobs is that they require a heavy management burden. When the process is broken down into many small pieces, we need multiple supervisors to manage the work. Someone needs to tell the employee what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and then check whether they have done it. Gary Hamel points out that since 1983, the number of managers, supervisors and support staff employed in the US economy has nearly doubled, while employment in other occupations has grown by less than 40%.1
Fixing the Work Product
As Dart Lindsley has pointed out, all companies compete in at least two markets. They compete for customers through the goods and services they offer. And they compete for employees through the work product and experience they offer. And that 'work product' often needs to be better designed. When companies invest in developing a new product, they often spend significant resources on understanding the needs of their customers which leads to creating products to meet their needs. But when it comes to employees, we tend not to put enough thought into designing a work product that people love.
Fortunately for us, most of that work has already been done when it comes to understanding what employees want from the work product. Six decades of research and countless real-world experiments have repeatedly shown that employees want meaningful work, autonomy, and feedback and that those who experience their jobs as motivating and meaningful are more engaged and productive than those who do not.
Leaders who incorporate these findings to create a better work product benefit handsomely. Here are some moves every manager should consider:
Minimize non-mission, low-value tasks
Consolidate tasks and create whole jobs
Simplify coordination and minimize distractions
Create mission ownership:
Establish direct customer relationships
Open feedback channels
Delegate responsibility to the lowest level
In our new book “Fixing Work: A Tale about Designing Jobs Employees Love,” David G. Henkin and I detail how leaders can realize the triple win. You can learn more about the book (and order your copy) at www.fixing-work.com.
https://hbr.org/2016/07/more-of-us-are-working-in-big-bureaucratic-organizations-than-ever-before