PEOPLE IN CHARGE: CREATING SELF MANAGING WORKPLACES

Robert Rehm

Hawthorn Press, 1999

Purpose of This Book

This book is a practical guide you can use to design your workplace to be self managing. It contains the concepts, do-it-yourself guides, and case examples you need to get you started on the road to self management. The basic premise of this approach is that organisation effectiveness—quality products and services—results when you redesign your workplace to be self managing. And, that the people who do the work are the ones who know best how to redesign it. Self managing workplace design is a participative way to get everyone in your organisation involved in workplace effectiveness.

People In Charge is for you if your organisation is considering workplace redesign. Any kind of organisation—corporation, small business, public sector, or government agency—can become more productive and effective by changing its structure to self management. The book is for managers who are considering the benefits of changing to self management, and what steps they can take to make sure real change happens. Workers will find this book a useful guide for understanding how self management can provide them more satisfaction at work, and at the same time make the organisation more successful. The book is also a resource for consultants and trainers wanting to learn effective ways for implementing self management.

Contents

Chapter 1: The Self Managing Workplace

Chapter 2: Doing Productive Work—Six Criteria For Productive Work

Chapter 3: Where Did the Self Managing Workplace Come From?

Chapter 4: Participating in Workplace Design

Chapter 5: The Participative Design Workshop

Chapter 6: Rebuilding the Land Bank of South Africa

Chapter 7: Getting the Conditions Right For Workplace Design

Chapter 8: A Start Up Guide For Self Managing Teams

Chapter 9: Improving Customer Satisfaction at Prudential by Fran Ryan and Clare Connor

Chapter 10: Making Wine the Self Managing Way At Southcorp by Bob Baxter

Chapter 11: Team Based Management in the U.S. Courts by David Hendrickson

Chapter 12: Western Washington Clerk’s Office: Our Journey Into Self Managing Teams by Janet Bubnis

Chapter 13: An Unexpected Team: The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra by John Lubans

Chapter 14: Do-it-yourself Management at Do It All Stores by Martin Large

Chapter 15: The Market Alignment Imperative by Gary Frank

Chapter 16: Stories From Workplace Redesign Experiences

Overview of the Book

The first four chapters of the book provide a foundation for understanding what we mean by self managing workplace design. Chapter 1 describes the design principle of self management in detail. Chapter 2 makes the link between organisation design and human productivity. Chapter 3 gives some background on the historical development of self management earlier in this century. And the fourth chapter emphasises the importance of participation in the design of any workplace.

Chapters 5 through 8 provide practical information on how to redesign your workplace to be self managing. Chapter 5 is a detailed discussion of the participative design workshop, an effective method for designing a self managing workplace. Chapter 6 is the story of how the Land Bank of South Africa used participative design workshops to redesign their branch banks to be self managing. The Land Bank gives a real life example of how the workshop can fundamentally change an organisation from bureaucratic to self managing. Chapter 7 goes into detail spelling out what an organisation should do to get ready for the change to self management. And chapter 8 is a practical guide new teams can use to get started on the path to self management.

The last five chapters are real life case examples of organisations that have changed to self management. The first case, chapter 9, is the story of how Prudential Assurance Company of the UK used the participative design workshop to redesign its call centre, putting workers in control of their own technology and customer service. Chapter 10 is the story of the Australian wine maker, Southcorp, who found it more profitable and productive to redesign its biggest wine making facility to a self managing team structure. Chapter 11 is about the U.S. Court system’s process for redesigning its district and bankruptcy court operations, and probation departments to a team based structure. The most amazing court system to implement self management is the Seattle district court office. Their story is told in bold style in chapter 12. Orchestrating Success, chapter 13, is the remarkable story of how the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra took up self management to produce beautiful music that brings down the house performance after performance. And, chapter 14 tells how the Do It All stores are using self managing teams to bring customer service to their customers.

Chapter 15 is about macro organisation design—the market alignment imperative. If the principle for workplace design is putting workers in control of their workplace, this chapter answers the question of how to design at the enterprise or corporate level, involving the redesign of multiple functions across an organisation of perhaps thousands of workers. The book closes with stories from workplace redesign experiences—chapter 16. In a series of short vignettes, the real reasons for changing to self management become clear. Putting people in charge of their workplace means transformation for the workers, the managers, and ultimately the whole organisation.

CHAPTER 2: DOING PRODUCTIVE WORK—SIX CRITERIA
FOR PRODUCTIVE WORK

Being productive is a basic human need. Kurt Lewin said, “People don’t live to produce, they produce to live.” We have a psychological (and probably biological) need to be productive; it’s a natural part of being human. Being productive means being creative, caring about quality in whatever we are doing, and being useful.

Bureaucratic workplaces are structured to prevent people from satisfying their human need to be productive. Doing quality work comes naturally to people when their environment is structured for it to blossom. You can design your workplace to unleash people’s natural tendencies to learn and perform, to be productive. The self managing workplace is an environment in which people can have an impact and be useful.

Here’s a thought from the American biologist Lewis Thomas: “One human trait, urging us on by our nature, is the drive to be useful, perhaps the most fundamental of all our biological necessities. We make mistakes with it, get it wrong, confuse it with self regard, even try to fake it, but it is there in our genes, needing only a better set of definitions for usefulness than we have yet agreed upon.”

Fred Emery and Einar Thorsrud identified six human needs that should be satisfied for people to do productive work. They are called the six criteria for productive work. We use these six human needs when designing a self managing workplace. In order for an organisation to be effective and deliver quality products and services, it has to be designed to satisfy these human needs.

1. Elbow room for decision making. To be productive, we humans need enough freedom of movement in order to feel that we can control our own efforts. At the same time, we need enough direction to know what to do. Each person has his or her own optimal level of elbow room. One person may thrive on lots of freedom, while another, doing the same job, prefers less involvement in decision making. Almost everyone, though, does not appreciate a boss hovering over them, breathing down their neck, telling them what to do. To some extent, people need to feel as if they are their own boss.

The bureaucratic workplace is traditionally a place where every person has someone higher up, like a supervisor, who is responsible for making decisions about their work. Each level of the hierarchy is there to watch over the work of the next lower level. Now we even see electronic surveillance used to make sure people do their work. The basic assumption of the bureaucratic workplace is that people are unreliable by nature, and need watching over, or they won’t perform properly.

In the self managing workplace, workers share responsibility for team decision making about work they are responsible for doing. In a self managing team, each person is aware of the needs of fellow members relating to elbow room. Teams become sensitive to the fact that one member needs more room than another for doing their own work, while others may need more direction. Everybody needs their own level of control over what they do.

2. Ongoing learning. There’s much discussion these days about the learning organisation and how to get one. The truth is that people are learning all the time. Being alive is a process of constant learning. The problem is that the bureaucratic workplace inhibits learning on the job.

Learning in this view is the ability to set goals and get feedback. People learn when they set reasonably challenging goals for themselves, and then make sure they get timely, accurate feedback to see how they did. The combination of goal setting and feedback is what we call learning. Take golf as an example. Almost everyone who plays golf, from the pro Jack Nicklaus to a duffer like me, is constantly trying to improve their game. Your goals may be quite simple—to shave five strokes off your score, or maybe for some of us, not to lose any more golf balls. When you hit the ball, feedback comes immediately. You see the ball go into the rough, your playing partner says—“too bad!”—again, and you feel that awful sensation of mishitting a driver. Your friends then give you some helpful advice on improving your swing and you try again.

Learning on the job is similar. The difference in the bureaucratic workplace is that usually goals are set somewhere else, by someone up there. The goals may not be realistic or achievable, or maybe not challenging enough. Feedback is often a surprise when you didn’t know you had a goal to begin with. Feedback from customers may come filtered through several levels of management, making it not very specific, and certainly long after the work was done. In the self managing workplace, to the extent possible, teams set their production and service goals, as well as skill development goals. Teams manage their own feedback processes, putting in place mechanisms, surveys, check points all along the production or service delivery process.

3. Variety. Every person has their own need for variety. Getting the right level of variety is a balancing act between boredom and fatigue. Being productive means being able to vary your work tasks so you don’t get too bored or too over stimulated. Bureaucratic workplaces are typically variety decreasing places. Jobs are designed to prevent people from using all their skills and talents. Job descriptions can be straight jackets keeping people in their proper place. Cross training may be allowed in some bureaucratic workplaces, but seldom are workers encouraged to learn management skills.

A well designed self managing workplace offers opportunities for everyone to optimise their needs for variety. If a team is designed to be multi-skilled, people can get training on new technical tasks. There are no job descriptions in the self managing workplace, just work groups with a variety of work to do. The opportunity to vary your work in a self managing workplace extends to what used to be supervisory or management work in the old design. Leadership and management work rotate around the team, giving everyone a chance to do new things.

4. Mutual support and respect. The golden rule is to treat people as you would have them treat you. It’s natural for people to cooperate and help one another. Humans need to cooperate, to work together towards a common goal. Bureaucratic workplaces are set up to discourage co-operation and to encourage competition among workers. In some cases, people don’t help one another at work because they don’t have the skills to do so, or it’s not part of their job, not in the job description. In other cases, people in the bureaucratic workplace don’t provide support because they don’t want anyone else to look good (but them) in the eyes of the boss.

In a workplace with self managing teams, people have the skills to do all the work of the team. They can jump in and give a helping hand if needed. It’s also in everyone’s interests to give mutual support on a team, because we’re all in it together. The structure of self managing teams encourages mutual support and the respect that goes with it. Getting the right amount of support and respect in the workplace knows no bounds. You can never have too much.

5. Meaningfulness. We all know that what separates humans from other life forms is the need to find meaning in all that we do. In the workplace, people need to feel that they are having an impact because of the work they do. They need to feel some connection between what they do all day and some higher benefit to their community, or society at large. Bureaucratic workplaces limit workers to just doing their often disconnected bit of work. It’s only upper management that appreciates the value the product or service has to customers and users. The very make up of jobs in the bureaucratic workplace is such that people do not see the whole product, beginning to end.

I once toured a hi-tech manufacturing plant. The plant had a traditional assembly line. At the end of the line was the testing area. The product looked to the outsider like big electronic boxes. So I asked one of the test technicians to tell me about his job. He seemed to appreciate my interest. He showed me how he monitored the testing measurement equipment to make sure the product worked properly. I asked him a question, “What is this product used for?” “I dunno,” he said with embarrassment. “I just test ‘em.” The technician’s job did not include information about customers or the basic purpose of the product. No wonder quality was not happening in this company.

People can design their own workplace so that their teams are much like business units. Business units are riveted on customer satisfaction. They have the skills to make a whole product, or deliver a complete service. They are knowledgeable about everything from financial performance to customer requirements.

6. Desirable future. People thrive on hope for the future. They want things to be better tomorrow that they are today. Bureaucratic workplaces offer a dead end to most workers. Jobs are narrowly defined. Promotion is available for the few who measure up to management’s expectations. In the self managing workplace, people typically report that they have a team environment in which they can learn and keep on learning. Training and development increase dramatically in this kind of organisation. Workers feel they have more influence over the success of the entire organisation. Instead of looking up for promotion, people look outward to the possibility of expanding their skills and earnings.

These six human needs are common across cultures and peoples throughout the world. These needs are in direct conflict with the structure of the bureaucratic workplace. In the bureaucratic workplace, people are deskilled and devalued by the very structure they work within every day. When people design their workplace to be self managing, they are creating an organisation structure in which each and every person can satisfy their needs to be a productive person. The goal in self managing workplace design is for people to design their work so that, as much as possible, each person can satisfy their human needs in the workplace.

Variety Increasing

When I was first trying to understand redundancy of functions, I asked Fred Emery, who came up with the principle, for a definition. “What is redundancy of functions, anyway?” His answer, “Variety increasing!” The answer sounded mystical until he explained it. Variety is increasing when people have an open horizon of personal development. Variety is increasing when they have the opportunity to learn and keep on learning when they can satisfy their needs for the right amount of challenge and routine. Variety is increasing when they can increase both their work skills and their room for decision making. Bureaucratic workplaces deskill and devalue people. The self managing workplace is a place where variety is not the spice of life, but the meat and potatoes. Variety is basic.

From a design point of view, once a work group structures itself to take responsibility for its own work, then the group will almost certainly become variety increasing. The group will begin multi-skilling to make sure it can achieve its production and quality goals, meeting the needs of its environment. In a self managing group, multi-skilling means the group can cover all the work that needs doing. Multi-skilling includes training in the technical work skills and functions required to get the group’s work done. It also means that the group needs to get thoroughly educated about the larger organisational strategies, goals, products, and services.

The rule of thumb is that a group needs enough skills spread throughout the group to provide coverage. In some workplaces, the design may provide lots of multi-skilling to make sure that people can adaptively do whatever work needs doing. In other workplaces, particularly those with the need for specialist roles like doctors and scientists, the group design may have individuals with specialised roles. Even this kind of design requires overlapping knowledge and joint coordination of group goals.

Work groups need to have direct knowledge of their external environment. They need to be in regular contact with customers, suppliers, and other important stakeholders. They need to have mechanisms for regularly scanning their environment so they know what’s happening around them. In a fast changing, turbulent world, an organisation needs to have the capacity to respond quickly. It has to possess an array of strategies, skills, and knowledge to deal with unexpected challenges and opportunities.

The Mystery of the Faulty Glue

* This story comes from my experience doing workplace redesign at StorageTek with my partner Gary Frank. StorageTek is a corporation that makes information storage systems. This story is documented by Blue Sky Productions in its workplace video, “Cutting Edge Teamwork.”

This story brings to life Fred Emery’s insights about ‘variety increasing’ workplaces. Here’s the scene: a warehouse floor strewn with a hundred computer storage units returned by dissatisfied customers because they didn’t work properly. Managers are looking out over this scene scratching their heads wondering what could have gone wrong. Now the problem was to disassemble each product and make it over again from scratch. Each unit is worth thousands of dollars. Reworking them will bring the plant to a standstill.

The plant is a division of a larger company that manufactures hi-tech storage devices. The head disk assembly is one of their products that works something like the common disk player at home. The difference is that one unit can record and play back enormous amounts of information and is used by banks, airlines, and all kinds of other large organisations that have massive information storage needs.

After considerable soul searching, management decided that maybe the problem was in the design of the workplace, not the product. The plant was made up of managers, supervisors, operators who assembled the product, and engineers who oversaw the technical system. Most of the manufacturing process occurred in surgery-like clean rooms where the product was moved on a kind of assembly line from clean room to clean room. Each operator stood at a station and did the work of attaching, torquing, or gluing parts. The operators had no idea what the product was used for. They just did their bit and sent it down the line. If a problem occurred, it was too much trouble to call in the dreaded supervisor or consult the arrogant engineer. It just wasn’t worth the trouble.

Everyone in the plant participated in redesigning their workplace to be self managing. Now the operators worked in self managing groups that controlled the production schedule and coordinated quality issues. Each operator now made his or her own products. The new work process called for each operator to assemble a whole unit, moving with the product along the assembly process, from room to room. They also formed special process teams made up of operators, managers, and engineers to manage process improvements and solve technical problems right away.

It didn’t take long for the new design to uncover the source of the defect. Operators started talking to one another in the break room one day. Before, they had talked mostly about their hobbies at home, or the latest antics of the supervisor. Now they talked about the products they were making. One of them mentioned, “You know, the glue I am using to make the connectors stick to the coils—when I get down farther in the process, it’s just not sticking like it should.” Another operator chimed in, “I noticed the same thing.” A third person said, “Maybe there’s something wrong with that glue, anyway.” The operator who had been there the longest remembered, “It was three or four years ago we had the same problem. Back then the problem had to do with how much glue we scraped off.” So, they called together their cross functional process improvement group of engineers, operators, and managers to discuss what they had discovered.

As it turned out, the problem was not the glue but the procedures operators were using to apply it. It didn’t take long for the operators to train each other in proper glue application. Within the first three months of implementation, quality improved 500% and the plant went on to win the company’s quality award. What made the difference? One operator put it this way. “Before we became responsible for ‘owning’ our own products, I didn’t care what happened to my work when it went downstream to another operator. Now there’s no ‘them’ down there anymore. It’s all up to me because my name is on the product.”