So what's the drawback to this? Well, the drawback to Taylor's approach and this engineering approach designing jobs is that people hated doing these kinds of jobs. And one of the reasons they hated them was because they were so boring. So the very beginnings many people believe of management research happened at Western Electric the company that made telephones and telephone equipment. Where they had people there working on tasks that were designed more or less with scientific management approaches and their paid piece rates, so much for each task they performed. And they discovered that people weren't working very hard here and a bunch of engineers and researchers came in to study them, and try to figure out what was going on. And there's a lot of debate as to what they really found but the general conclusion was that the workers there cared about things other than just the peace race. And one of the key things they cared about was their social interactions with each other. Part of what they were doing was systematically holding down effort, even though it was costing them individually money. And I think part of the reason was the belief that if they worked harder, then the bosses would just cut the piece rates. And so, they wouldn't end up working making any more money. This goes back to our earlier discussion about motivation and particularly the idea of expectancy. Do you believe that the employer will actually do what they say? And here, they believe they would not. So if we worked harder and started producing more and making more money, the company would just cut their rates so that we don't make more money, and then we'd be stuck working faster and harder. Now, the biggest problem with this scientific management approach, though, comes a generation later in the 1970s. And particularly in these assembly operations, the most important of which were in the auto industry. And it arises from the fact that people hated their jobs. And the poster child for this problem, although it was happening around the world, not just in the US, was General Motors plant in the city of Lordstown, Ohio. A plant that made Chevrolet Vegas, an early car that was designed to compete with the Japanese, fuel efficient car. I owned one, really lousy car to be honest, and really not very safe. Car had enormous quality problems. So in a typical car plant, they have what's known as a rework area. Car comes off the assembly line, they turn the key to start it. If it doesn't start, it goes over to a rework area where some multi-skilled people will plunge in on it and see if they can fix what's wrong. The Vega plant didn't have a rework area, it had a rework parking lot. Because so many cars would come off the assembly line, and not work. And when they open the hood to try to look inside the car and see what was wrong, they'd see a bunch of stuff missing, like no carburetor. Or they would see things that looked like sabotage, a washer thrown in the throat of the carburetor, upholstery slashed, things like that. 1,000 or so cars at a time that really weren't working, and they tried to figure out what's going on here. So they look into the factory and it didn't look that much different than other factories except it was even more automated. The assembly line moved even faster, which meant that people had to do those repetitive tasks, more of them over the course of the day. The big thing was the work force was pretty young and was actually had some college. So the average worker had been to school at least a year or so of college. The problem was, the work was really boring over time as they perfect the scientific management, the work at even more boring and you had a generation of people going into these jobs who we're going to do this for the rest of their life. And unlike their parents who'd come out of the Great Depression, this didn't seem like such a great deal to them. Now, the reason this mattered is because the quality problems were really bad, especially for cars compared to the Japanese system, which was much better built cars, and quality translates into money. So quality problems were causing performance problems which were causing financial problems, and were ultimately going to cause the entire US auto industry a lot, market share, business, jobs, everything. So we had to do something about this and so what did we do? So what happened during the 1970s, at least toward the end of 1970s, was an effort to rethink job design, to look at how we were organizing work and the performance of these tasks, at the level of the worker in these big assembly plants. The reason we're doing this is because it was costing the companies a lot of money. And the workers were miserable too, a lot of strikes over little things, turn over problems, etc. And so, the new approach was to think about these jobs from you might say a human perspective rather than an engineer’s perspective. So the engineer's perspective or thinking about fitting people to the machines. And the more human perspective was saying, what are the people like and how might you adapt the work to accommodate the needs and the interests of the people at least a bit? So what is it we learned about people and what they liked about their work and what they hated about their work? Well, in general one of the things that people like about work is social interactions. You're with other people. And often we like the people we work with and if we do, that's a big reason for going to work and one of the things we liked about it. One of the things we learned from those Western Electric studies was that, that the people in these assembly operations in Western Electric wanted to talk to each other, and paid a lot of attention to what everybody else was doing. The other thing we learned about jobs and what people liked about them was a series of things about the tasks and how they were performed beyond simply getting a paycheck at the end. And there's kind of a list of these upon which there's general agreement now, and the first of these might be the idea of autonomy, which you can think about as control. What do I control about my work? Do I get to decide, for example, when I get to take a break? Do I get to decide how I perform this particular task? Well, under the scientific management approach of Frederick Taylor, the answer to everyone of those questions is going to be no. You don't control anything. The engineers that designed your job specified everything about it and we figured out on average, the best way to do everything so we don't need any of your help, thank you very much. Well, it turns out that even if what they're doing is not optimal from a design point of view, individuals really like to have control. The more control they've got, the happier they are, the more control they've got, the less stress they feel about things. So autonomy is one big thing. A second thing that they really value is variety. People get bored doing the same thing over and over. There's a phrase for this in psychology called habituation, which means that we turn off stimulus, which is repetitive and doesn't seem to matter very much to us. You probably know this if you've ever moved into a new place and particularly if it's maybe some place were there's a lot of noise around, you woken up early in the morning because the garbage trucks come in or there's a big pothole in front of your house, and you can't sleep the first few nights. And then after that, you find that you can sleep. And then, you're okay with it. Your brain has just tuned it out, and you don't even notice it anymore until you get a visitor who stays with you and then they're up all night and they say, I couldn't sleep. That stupid pothole in front of your house, and you're saying, what are you talking about? Well, your brain has tuned it out. And the problem with repetitive work, always the same over and over and over is that our brain begins to tune the work out and we're just not paying attention to it anymore. And for workers, this is pretty dangerous, especially if you're working with machinery that is heavy and powerful and you could rip yourself up pretty good. If you're worried just about the quality of the work you're doing, it's not good for that either because you're not paying attention to things and it's easy to start making mistakes or ignore quality problems as they're coming along. So from the human perspective, variety matters a lot. The third thing that seems to matter a lot is do we understand and appreciate how what we are doing fits into the bigger picture of what maybe the company is doing or the agency we're working for, what is the significance of my work? So in the field of health care, for example, some famous studies looking at hospital induced infections. Real problem in terms of hospital stays, you get sick in the hospital and you're already not in great shape, which is why you're there in the first place and then you pick up an infection. Which has been bred and perfected in the hospital and it’s really hard to get rid of and a lot of people have great complications, including death from these hospital induced infections. Well, what’s the cause of these? It's bacteria and viruses in the environment of the hospital. What can you do to control this? Clean the place up, and kill germs on the walls, on the floors, on the equipment, everything around. Who's in charge of that? Well, if there's one group, it's probably the janitorial staff. Which is the group of employees that are often ignored, lowest of the pecking order in the organizational chart. Well, in the these studies, what they did is they explained to the janitors the significance of their work. Here's hospital induced infections. Here's what they look like when people get sick. They're killing a lot of people. It's a terrible thing. The cause is bacteria on the walls and equipment. If we wipe that out, and here's how we wipe it out, then these guys don't get sick. And once they were able to not just explain but show, the janitors, what this meant, then the janitors were much more effective at cleaning the rooms. Hospital induced infection rates fell, and the reason for this is the janitors cared more about their work. They were more motivated, you might say, but it was really something about their appreciation for what they were doing that caused them to do the jobs better. The fourth thing, which is actually related to the significance question is, can I get feedback about the tasks I've performed? Can I see how it's going? And back to the janitors for a minute, when they could get information on how well they had cleaned rooms, say, come in maybe and do swabs and check for bacteria counts, and they could tell when they did a good job and when they did a poor job, they were paying more attention to the work. It made the work more interesting for people. Turnover rates fell, employee satisfaction improved. Commitment to the organization that is caring about doing a good job went up as well. And these are four of the big factors and they all relate to how the job is performed. None of this has anything to do with money nor does it anything to do with benefits or anything like that. It's all about how the tasks themselves are performed.
