Raising the productivity of service work is the first social responsibility of management.
The need to raise the productivity of service work is a social priority in developed countries. Unless it is met, the developed world faces increasing social tensions, increasing polarization, increasing radicalization. It may increasingly face a new class war. Unless the productivity of service work is rapidly improved, both the social and economic position of a large class—as large a group as people making the moving things ever were at their peak—must steadily go down. Real incomes cannot for any length of time be higher than productivity. The service workers may use their numerical strength to get higher wages than their economic contribution justifies. But this only impoverishes all of society with everybody’s real income going down and unemployment going up. Or the incomes of the unskilled workers are allowed to go down in relation to the steadily raising wages of the affluent knowledge workers, with an increasing gulf between the two groups, an increasing polarization into classes. In either case the service workers must become alienated, increasingly bitter, increasingly see themselves as a class apart.
We know how to raise service work productivity. This is production work and what we have learned during the past hundred years about increasing productivity applies to such work with minimum adaptation. The task is known and doable, but the urgency is great. It is, in fact, the first social responsibility of management in the knowledge society.
ACTION POINT: Set annual targets for raising the productivity of your service staff. Reward those who are successful in meeting these new targets.
The Ecological Vision
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker