The significance of a worker’s role to the broader organization and beyond it. High value jobs may be in organizations that serve an obvious public good, such as a paramedic. A high value job may also be one that has an obvious and direct impact on the success of the organization, such as CEO or controller. In contrast, low value jobs may be ones where workers assemble small electronic subassemblies which are shipped elsewhere to become a finished product.

 

Improvement Action: Expand work cycles so that individuals build significant or entire parts of a product

Source:

P.G. Gyllenhammar, People at Work, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1977

  • GWT Analysts Summary:  Volvo's Kalmar plant was designed around the idea that none of the workers' view should be limited to just nuts and bolts or single components. To that end, work cycles were designed so that workers assembled a significant amount of each car. The cars were brought to the assembly station and remained there, allowing one worker to perform many tasks before the car moved on.
  • Excerpt from text: “The planners were already working on the premise that humanity and efficiency could be combined to some extent. Their first report emphasized group work expanded the tasks that each worker should do, and gave work groups some opportunity to vary the speed of their work. It focused on good physical conditions, ample space, and noise control, but still included the conveyor line. A new factory, though, presents a unique opportunity to try out entirely new solutions. Here, starting from scratch, we might be able to achieve changes that would be very difficult to implement within and existing plant. Therefore, quite late in the planning cycle, I interrupted the project and set out new objectives. A new and non-traditional type of task force was pulled together and given the almost impossible task of designing a landmark factory as an alternative to the traditional plan. The ideal goal for the new plan was to make it possible for an employee to see a blue Volvo driving down the street and say to himself “I made that car.” The original objectives for the alternative planning group assumed that they could develop a new materials handling system and a new product transportation system. The design must give individuals as much control as possible over their own working lives. The guidelines memo concluded that instead of a conveyor belt moving through a warehouse, Kalmar should be based on stationary work, with the materials brought to the work station. Each group work area should accommodate about fifteen workers. Tasks could be varied within a group, and each group would take more responsibility for the quality of its own work. We also felt that the strong reputation of our products in the marketplace should be reflected more directly back to the workers. This meant that no one’s view should be limited to nuts and bolts, or single components. p 54-55

 

Improvement Action: Create opportunities for workers to interact with end users or downstream customers of their task

Source:

J.R. Hackman and G. R. Oldham, Work Redesign, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1980

  • GWT Analysts Summary:  In the book Work Redesign, Hackman and Oldham recommend establishing contact between a worker and the "customer" of their work. In a manufacturing environment, the customer would be a downstream process. In Lean environments, this is facilitated by the lack of in process inventory between processes. Direct feedback about the quality of one's work increases the sense of value experienced by the worker.
  • Excerpt from text: “...natural work units can often be formed around specific groups of “clients” of the work. In such cases, it may be possible to put the employee in direct contact with those clients and give him or her continuing responsibility for managing relationships with them.”  “Creating client relationships is a three-step process. First, the client must be identified - not always an easy task. Second, the most direct contact possible between the worker and the client is established. Third, criteria are set up by which the client can judge the quality of the product or service received. And, whenever possible, the client should have a means of relaying his or her judgments directly back to the worker.” “The contact between worker and client should be as great as possible and as frequent as necessary to reduce the chance that messages will be distorted or delayed. Face-to-face contact is highly desirable, at least occasionally. In any case, it is important that the performance criteria used by the client be mutually understood and agreed upon.” “By enabling employees to establish direct relationships with the clients of their work, improvements are often realized simultaneously… [and] feedback increases because of additional opportunities for individuals to obtain direct and immediate praise or criticism of their work outputs from the persons who receive the work.” pp.137-138

 

Improvement Action: Build small working teams that are responsible for their own work

Source:

Semler, Ricardo. (1989). Managing without managers. Harvard Business Review. Sept-Oct 1989, pp. 76-84.

  • GWT Analysts Summary:  Ricardo Semler of Semco states that a workforce is most effective when it is divided into smaller autonomous teams. His reasoning is based on typical human activities and relationships. In his articles, he criticizes highly bureaucratic organizations and praises smaller, nimble structures.
  • Excerpt from text: “As Antony Jay pointed out back in the 1950s in Corporation Man, human beings weren’t designed to work in big groups. Until recently, our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. For more than five million years, they refined their ability to work in groups of no more than about a dozen people. Then along comes the industrial revolution, and suddenly workers are trying to function efficiently in factories that employ hundred and even thousands. Organizing those hundreds into teams of about ten members each may help some, but there’s still a limit to how many small teams can work well together. At Semco, we’ve found the most effective production unit to consist of about 150 people. The exact number is open to argument, but it’s clear that several thousand people in one facility makes individual involvement an illusion.” p77

 

Improvement Action: Allow workers to provide input for organizational-level issues

Sources:

Semler, Ricardo. (1989). Managing without managers. Harvard Business Review. Sept-Oct 1989, pp. 76-84.

  • GWT Analysts Summary:  According to Ricardo Semler, fostering participation of the workforce in decision making is key to success. In this article he states: "The first of Semco’s three values is democracy, or employee involvement. Clearly, workers who control their working conditions are going to be happier that workers who don’t. Just as clearly, there is no contest between the company that buys the grudging compliance of its workforce and the company that enjoys the enterprising participation of its employees."
  • Excerpt from text: “Semco has three fundamental values on which we base some 30 management programs. These values - democracy, profit sharing, and information - work in a complicated circle, each dependent on the other two. If we eliminated one, the others would be meaningless. Our corporate structure, employee freedoms, union relations, factory size limitations - all are products of our commitment to these principles. The first of Semco’s three values is democracy, or employee involvement. Clearly, workers who control their working conditions are going to be happier that workers who don’t. Just as clearly, there is no contest between the company that buys the grudging compliance of its workforce and the company that enjoys the enterprising participation of its employees. p 77

Semler, Ricardo, Out of this world: Doing things the Semco way, Global Business and Organizational Excellence, July/August 2007, p13-21

  • Excerpt from text: At Semco, we believe that economic success requires replacing control and structure with democracy in the workplace. As you’ve probably already gathered, we place an immense amount of power in the hands of the workers. With a show of hands, our employees can veto new product ideas or scrap entire business ventures. When it comes right down to it, it’s about trusting our employees to be responsible adults. Think about it. People are considered adults in their private lives, at the back, at their children’s schools, with family and among friends, so why are they suddenly treated like adolescents  at work? Why can’t workers be involved in choosing their own leaders? Why shouldn’t they manage themselves? Why can’t they speak up - challenge, question, share information openly?” p18

 

Improvement Action: Disclose information such as finances, productivity, and salary distribution to workforce

Source:

Semler, Ricardo. (1989). Managing without managers. Harvard Business Review. Sept-Oct 1989, pp. 76-84.

  • GWT Analysts Summary:  According to Ricardo Semler, sharing financial metrics with the workforce is critical: “Semco’s experience has convinced me that profit sharing has an excellent chance of working when it crowns a broad program of employee participation, when the profit-sharing criteria are so clear and simple that the least gifted employee  can understand them, and, perhaps most important, when employees  have monthly access to the company’s vital statistics - costs, overhead, sales, payroll, taxes, profits.
  • Excerpt from text: “Semco’s experience has convinced me that profit sharing has an excellent chance of working when it crowns a broad program of employee participation, when the profit-sharing criteria are so clear and simple that the least gifted employee  can understand them, and, perhaps most important, when employees  have monthly access to the company’s vital statistics - costs, overhead, sales, payroll, taxes, profits.

 

Improvement Action: Fit jobs to people

Source:

J.R. Hackman and G. R. Oldham, Work Redesign, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1980

  • GWT Analysts Summary:  According to Hackman and Oldham in Work Redesign, jobs can be designed in such a way that fits with a worker's needs to work from internal motivation. Giving workers autonomy over work is often key to creating a job that the worker finds value-enhancing.
  • Excerpt from text: “The basic notion is that by designing work so that people can be internally motivated to perform well, gains will be realized both in the productive effectiveness of organizations and in the personal well-being of the work force. ”Under [Fitting jobs to people], work would sometimes be designed to be done by individuals working more or less autonomously, and other times it would be set up to be performed by self-managing work groups. But in either case the aspiration would be to arrange things so that employees (1) experience the work as inherently meaningful (2) feel personal (or collective) responsibility for the outcome of the work, and (3) receive, on a regular basis trustworthy knowledge about the results of the work activities.” p 260