Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 65, by Joe Podolsky:
From: JOE_PODOLSKY@HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 96 16:23:35 -0800
Subject: Quality of Life
Most enlightened businesses today are seriously concerned with stress on their people. Stress has lots of causes, of course, but the big one is increasing, unabating work loads. This leaves us with less time than we need for our lives outside of work, which, in turn, causes more stress. All of us are living this problem, but no one seems to feel we know enough about it to do anything. So we take employee surveys, both to show our concern and to gather data. We implement all sorts of programs on "work/life balance" and "quality of work life." And, of course, we urge empowerment, hoping that people with more control over their tasks will provide better customer service, lower costs, all while making themselves happier. Whether or not all this makes a difference depends on which of those employee surveys we read. For all our efforts, the problems seem to be growing. The only definite result of our programs is that Dilbert and Dogbert have become the gurus of the decade, eclipsing the even glows of Tom Peters and Michael Hammer. The Information Technology- Human Resources Department runs a class twice a year to help people learn the basics of business process consulting. The class is held for several days a month over a five month period and gives the participants tastes of a wide variety of basic processes. In the latest session, Jim Taylor, a professor, consultant, and author led an introduction to the sociotechnical systems discipline. Appropriately, one aspect of his material discussed "quality of working life." Taylor says that there are four factors to consider; quality of working life is a result of the degree to which all of these are present. These factors are centrality, competence, control, and commitment. Centrality is the degree to which we see our work as important to the central, core work of our organization. One way we try to accomplish this is via purpose and vision statements, using a management methodology such as HP's Quality Maturity System to link all tasks into issues that are important to customers and business results. Competence reflects how well we feel we can do our jobs. This, of course, is a matter of perception. We set our own expectations for the needs of our tasks, modified, of course, by feedback from other people and, in too few cases, even from objective metrics. We all have our own opinions of how well we meet those needs, modified, of course, by our internal self-confidence and our perceptions of the cooperation we are getting from others. Control is the degree to which we feel in charge of what we are doing. Control is related to the concept of empowerment, and I'll discuss this later. Finally, commitment is a measure of our passion about our tasks. Robert Pirsig, in _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ (which is arguably the best book on quality ever written) equates quality to caring. Commitment, however, cuts deeply two ways. If Taylor's other attributes are present, strong commitment increases the quality of our working lives; we feel good about doing well something we care about. If, however, commitment is strong but we feel that we can't do the job because other attributes are missing, we're going to be far more frustrated than if we just didn't care. So how do we get centrality, competence, control, and commitment? The textbook answer is through empowerment. But empowerment is a fuzzy concept. At it's worst, empowerment is cynically viewed as more work, more potential blame, but no more pay. Even when both managers and employees approach this topic with sincere goodwill, the process trips over invisible piles of tacit assumptions about organizational purpose and goals, and, more importantly, about power and actual rewards and punishments. It's an area where words are so ambiguous that only actions matter. Therefore, even small change takes much more than a few memos and meetings. I recently read an article that helped me structure some of my thinking about empowerment. Robert C. Ford and Myron D. Fottler wrote, "Empowerment: A Matter Degree." It was originally published in the August 1995 issue of _Executive_ magazine, but I saw a reprint in the Fall 1996 issue of _IEEE Engineering Management Review_. Ford and Fottler say that we need to consider two distinct types of empowerment: discretion in job content and in job context. Job content describes the procedures needed to do a specific job. Job context, however, is a much broader concept that includes such things as organizational products and services, structures, rewards, and job boundaries. Many of the problems in empowerment come from confusion in communicating assumptions between content and context. The authors draw a chart with discretion in job content on one axis and discretion in job context on the other. When there is low discretion in both content and context, they say the job has "no discretion." This is the typical assembly line job of the early industrial age. Everyone says they are eliminating these kinds of jobs. When discretion over context is low but content discretion is high, we have what the authors call a "task setting" job. Arguably, this is what most people mean when they are talking about empowerment. The (usually implicit) rule is "you figure out how to do the assigned task better, but you have no discretion about the deliverables, the resources, the rewards, or the schedules." Another point on the chart is the "mission defining" state, where discretion over context is high but the discretion over content is low. This is a situation where we say, "We'll tell you exactly how to do the job, but we're not going to tell you how to organize, how to reward the people, etc." This is a somewhat strange place, but we're seeing it a lot lately, not inside organizations, but in outsourcing agreements. We specify contractually the content of the tasks, but we completely and intentionally avoid specifying context. The last area, of course, is where the discretion of both job content and context is high. The authors call this the "self managed" state. From the standpoint of empowerment, this may seem like the ideal, but the authors feel that both managers and employees have to grow into this state. Getting there takes time, a supportive organizational culture, on-going education, and trust. Note, no one is recommending one type of empowerment over another. What is important, however, is that both the "empowerer" and the "empoweree" have the same understanding of the empoweree's discretion. As I noted earlier, the main source of information about these issues comes from employee surveys (and, of course, since we are also part of the problem, from what we feel ourselves and see in our friends). Arnold M. Lund is a human factors manager at Ameritech. He did research on employee surveys with the professionals in his department and published the results in an article titled, "Are We Having Fun Yet?," in the November-December 1996 issue of _ACM Interactions_. After several experiments, Lund developed a reasonably short survey that he feels gives him useful results; i.e., information that seems to correlate with objective productivity metrics. However, I thought the last paragraph of the article drove home a key and paramount message. Here's an excerpt: "...Some time ago I (Lund) heard that the CEO of Southwestern Airlines had been interviewed. He was asked how he managed to create a work climate in which everyone was so positive, so enthused about the company, and so service oriented. He said, 'I hire only happy people.' He claimed it was virtually impossible to move people's attitudes..." Lund disagrees... unconvincingly. Lund says, "Individuals can have a big impact on a local climate. My experience through the use of the survey, however, is that although it is difficult to improve the health of a work climate through management activities other than shuffling personnel, it is not impossible, and it is worth the effort." Out of all this, I distill three managerial "laws" for having a happy, productive workforce: 1) Hire happy people; 2) Don't hurt people (i.e., It's more important to NOT do things that people feel are wrong or dumb than it is to do things that are great); 3) Whether calling it delegation, management by objectives, or empowerment, be clear about job expectations. As with all guidelines like these, they are simple but not easy. What we are talking about is not "work" ... and some other "life." We're talking about whole people, about the quality of their entire lives. Whenever we try to subdivide people, we're going to make a mess. Let's not do that. What have been your experiences in working with people? What special words of wisdom do we have for working with IT people? Regards, Joe