Results for a scientist—the advancement of scientific knowledge—may be quite irrelevant to the organization.
Defining the task makes it possible to define what the results of a given task should be. There is often more than one right answer to the question of what the right results are. Salespeople are right when they define results as the largest sale per customer, and they are also right when they define results as customer retention.
Hence the next and crucial step in making the knowledge worker productive is to define what results are or should be in a particular knowledge worker’s task. This is—and should be—a controversial decision. It is also a risk-taking decision. Above all, it is the point where the individual worker’s task and the mission of the organization converge and have to be harmonized. It is up to management to decide whether the department store aims at maximum sales per transaction or at maximum sales per customer. It is up to management to decide whether the patient or the physician is the primary customer of the hospital. And this decision is going to be one of the permanent challenges for managers and executives in the knowledge organization.
In knowledge work, the how only comes after the what has been answered.
In manual work task is always given. Wherever there still are domestic servants, the owner of the house tells them what to do. The machine or the assembly line programs the factory worker. But, in knowledge work, what to do becomes the first and decisive question. For knowledge workers are not programmed by the machine. They largely are in control of their own tasks and must be in control of their own tasks. For they, and only they, own and control the most expensive of the means of production—their education—and their most important tool—their knowledge. They do use other tools, of course, whether the nurse’s IV or the engineer’s computer. But their knowledge decides how these tools are being used and for what. They know what steps are most important and what methods need to be used to complete the tasks; and it is their knowledge that tells them what chores are unnecessary and should be eliminated.
Work on knowledge-worker productivity therefore begins with asking the knowledge workers themselves: What is your task? What should it be? What should you be expected to contribute? and What hampers you in doing your task and should be eliminated? The how only comes after the what has been answered.
Knowledge-worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker be both seen and treated as an asset rather than a cost.
Work on the productivity of the knowledge worker has barely begun. But we already know a good many of the answers. We also know the challenges to which we do not yet know the answers.
Six major factors determine knowledge-worker productivity.
Knowledge-worker productivity demands that we ask the question: “What is the task?”
It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task, and the responsibility of knowledge workers.
Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.
Productivity of the knowledge worker is not—at least not primarily—a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.
Finally, knowledge-worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker be both seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a “cost.” It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.
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.
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.
Knowledge work includes manual operations that require industrial engineering.
Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s principles sound deceptively simple. The first step in making the manual worker productive is to look at the task and to analyze its constituent motions. The next step is to record each motion, the physical effort it takes and the time it takes. Then motions that are not needed can be eliminated. Then each of the motions that remain as essential to obtaining the finished product is set up so as to be done the simplest way, the easiest way, the way that puts the least physical and mental strain on the operator, the way that requires the least time. Then these motions are put together again into a “job” that is in logical sequence. Finally, the tools needed to do the motions are redesigned.
Taylor’s approach is still going to be the organizing principle in countries in which manual work is the growth sector of society and economy. In developed countries the challenge is no longer to make manual work productive. The central challenge will be to make knowledge workers productive. But, there is a tremendous amount of knowledge work—including work requiring highly advanced and theoretical knowledge—that includes manual operations. And the productivity of these operations also requires Industrial Engineering, the name by which Taylor’s methodology now goes.
The Japanese heeded first and best my point of view that people must be viewed as your colleagues and as one of your prime resources. It is only through such respect of the workers that true productivity is achieved.
People are a resource and not just a cost. The most enlightened managers have started to understand what could be realized by managing people toward a desired end or goal. Management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege; it’s so much more than “making deals.” Management affects people and their lives, both in business and in many other aspects as well.
The model for the syndicate is the nineteenth-century farmers’ cooperative.
The approaches at GM and Toyota, however different, still take the traditional corporation as their point of departure. But there are also some new ideas that do away with the corporate model altogether.
One example is a “syndicate” being tested by several noncompeting manufacturers in the European Union. Each of the constituent companies is medium-sized, family-owned, and owner-managed. Each is a leader in a narrow, highly engineered product line. Each is heavily export-dependent. The individual companies intend to remain independent, and to continue to design their products separately. They will also continue to make them in their own plants for their main markets, and to sell them in these markets. But for other markets, and especially for emerging or less-developed countries, the syndicate will arrange for the making of the products, either in syndicate-owned plants producing for several of the members or by local contract manufacturers. The syndicate will handle the delivery of all members’ products, and service them in all markets. Each member will own a share of the syndicate, and the syndicate, in turn, will own a small share of each member’s capital. If this sounds familiar, it is because the model is the nineteenth-century farmers’ cooperative.
