How being less efficient can mean more
productivity, June 2, 2006, 2D.
Efficiency is a big topic these days. With gasoline and
energy prices at all-time highs, many people are looking to
get the most out of every energy dollar. Some are trading
in their gas-guzzling vehicles for ones that are more
fuel-efficient. They want to travel further on each gallon
of fuel they purchase.
The theories used to structure organizations and jobs through
the Industrial Revolution and into the early 1900s were also
very focused on efficiency. Companies wanted to maximize
organizational output and simultaneously minimize the inputs
to produce those outputs. In manufacturing, jobs were
studied and tasks reduced so that each worker performed only
a few distinct operations. With every worker in a factory
doing one or two things over and over, workers became very
efficient in their production. Employees worked long days
with few breaks and had little chance to interact with
others, make decisions, or give input to the production
process. Workers were viewed as interchangeable parts of an
efficient manufacturing machine.
Although
very efficient in their production, the factories of the
Industrial Revolution were rather unpleasant places to
work. Performing the same repetitive tasks everyday was
boring and monotonous for the workers and because many had
no input in setting the terms and conditions of work,
employees also tended to feel powerless and enslaved. It
was not until some groundbreaking research in the 1920s and
1930s did the traditional understanding of the relationship
between efficiency and worker performance change.
From a
multi-year study of workers at an assembly plant, known as
the Hawthorne Studies, organizational researchers
recognized the importance of paying attention to human needs
and making workers feel valued. In a series of
work-performance experiments, workers were allowed to give
input to management decisions and permitted to interact with
their coworkers (and thereby become members of a team). The
experiments manipulated the hours of work and the timing and
durations of lunch and rest breaks. Performance was studied
across the entire series of experiments. Researchers found
that performance rose across each experimental
condition—even ones giving workers longer breaks and shorter
work hours. Traditional organization theorists would never
have predicted this finding. It would have been like
turning off an efficient machine for part of the day and
getting more output from it than if it had been left on for
the entire day. The findings caused managers and
researchers to question their assumptions and beliefs about
organizations, efficiency, performance, and the importance
of people in the workplace.
What
arose from those studies was recognition that organizations
are made up of people and not machine parts, and that by
attending to basic human needs (e.g., to be recognized, to
feel valued, to have input, to be part of a team, and to
meaningfully interact with others) organizations can back
off of efficiency and still become MORE effective and
productive. Efficiency is still important to organizations,
but sometimes being less efficient can be even more
effective for organizations.
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