Sell the mailroom.
Improving the productivity of service workers will demand fundamental changes in the structure of organizations. Service work in many cases will be contracted out of the organization to whom the service is being rendered. This applies particularly to support work, such as maintenance, and to a good deal of clerical work. “Outsourcing,” moreover, will be applied increasingly to such work as drafting for architects and to the technical or professional library. In fact, American law firms already contract out to an outside computerized “database” most of what their own law library used to do.
The greatest need for increased productivity is in activities that do not lead to promotion into senior management within the organization. But nobody in senior management is likely to be much interested in this kind of work, know enough about it, care greatly for it, or even consider it important. Such work does not fit the organization’s value system. In the hospital, for instance, the value system is that of the doctors and nurses. They are concerned with patient care. No one therefore pays much attention to maintenance work, support work, clerical work. We should therefore expect within a fairly short period of years to find such work contracted out to independent organizations, which compete and get paid for their own effectiveness in making this kind of work more productive.
ACTION POINT: Make your backroom service activities someone else’s front room.
Post-Capitalist Society
Managing for the Future
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker