It’s hard to believe that in 2024, in most businesses, work and operations will still be organized as they were in the heyday of Taylorism, especially in the world of knowledge workers who generate over 50% of the GNP of developed economies (AI revolution: how will it affect employees?).
Regrettable but true.
“Peter Drucker noted that during the twentieth century, the productivity of manual workers in the manufacturing sector increased by a factor of fifty as we got smarter about the best way to build products. He argued that the knowledge sector, by contrast, had hardly begun a similar process of self-examination and improvement, existing at the end of the twentieth century where manufacturing had been a hundred years earlier. ”
The Newyorker – Slack Is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work
According to the same Drucker, “
“The most important contribution of management in the 20th century was to increase manual worker productivity fifty-fold. The most important contribution of management in the 21st century will be to increase knowledge worker productivity-hopefully by the same percentage“, but, as he himself observed, “For the most part, what we call management consists of complicating people’s work“.
And when we talk about complicating people’s work, we’re also talking about process, organizational debt (How to Tackle the Biggest Threat to Your Team’s Growth).
Coming back to knowledge workers, what distinguishes them from the Taylorian world, where the aim was to replicate perfection ad infinitum, and where only one way of doing things should exist, is that in the world of knowledge work, where we mainly manage unique cases and exceptions, the same method can lead to several ways of doing things, and as many different results.
This is why many businesses in these industries and in the service sector are looking for a model and an approach better suited to their reality, which is to move away from operational and administrative complication and towards greater simplicity and flexibility (How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated)
But to achieve this, we need to change our paradigm and admit that this can only work by trusting in individual and collective intelligence, and abandoning the dogma of the individual’s total submission to processes in favor of recognizing his or her right to influence and adapt them (Employees must follow the processes. Are you sure?).
This is an area of research and experimentation known as People Centric Operations. Fortunately, examples of businesses that operate differently do exist, even if they are not legion.
People Centric Operations: what are we talking about?
People Centric Operations redefine operations management by placing people at the center of decisions and processes.They are based on three fundamental principles (People-Centric Operations: Achievements and Future Research Directions).
Firstly, recognition of individual contribution and impact: each employee brings unique knowledge and talents that directly influence performance. In contrast to the manufacturing world, the individual and collective talent of employees counts as much or even more than the process in the success of the organization.
Secondly, the evolutionary nature of these talents. Employees are not there to replicate the same gesture ad infinitum, but their skills must evolve over time , which requires ongoing training programs, knowledge-sharing between peers and the ability to learn from experience (learn on the job).
The last isautonomy in decision-making. It is the decisions of individuals in the course of their work that have an impact on the organization’s performance, rather than those of those who organize the work, since the latter impose a constrained framework instead of setting a framework within which they allow autonomy and flexibility. The manager must control the framework, not the work (How to love control and not be a burden to yourself and your teams?).
For a learning and resilient organization
What do businesses expect from this approach? Unsurprisingly, it’s the answer to all their problems, due in part to ways of operating and managing that are out of step with today’s world (and even yesterday’s).
First and foremost, resilience, with organizations that can cope more easily with change and the unexpected, thanks to the ability of employees in the field to make decisions and adapt without waiting for someone to tell them what to do. In a way, this is the principle of subsidiarity applied to business. Employee participation can also take place upstream, not to adapt but to rethink the organization of work (Change and transformation need a new approach).
Innovation is also expected. By valuing and unleashing employees’ creativity, organizations can develop innovative solutions in a highly responsive way.
Such approaches also improve employee engagement, insofar as they help to align their personal objectives with those of the organization (The quest for purpose: how to align individual aspirations with corporate objectives?)
Some see it as a tool for the transition to new forms of management , or even as one of the components of a management style emphasizing empowerment, collaboration and trust. A transformation that requires a decentralization of processes (How To Transition To The ‘Next Management).
But above all, we expect operational efficiency, productivity and quality (Productivity: what if quality was the new quantity?) as the result of a form of simplification in contrast to the rampant complication of organizations (The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience).
An ongoing but as yet unfinished project
If the concept is seductive, it has to be said that it has been in the air for a long time, without being able to be said to have given birth to anything truly astounding.
It all began, of course, with Peter Drucker, who identified intellectual work as the key challenge of the XXI? century.
“The new knowledge workers were no longer employees needing direct supervision. Instead, they were independent, possessing specialized knowledge in areas outside of management’s expertise. Knowledge work was self-contained and portable. ”
“knowledge workers needed little motivation to actually perform their work. However, the challenge was to align knowledge work with the organizational mission and to prevent siloing of specialized knowledge areas.”
The Future of Knowledge Work: What Drucker can teach us
Lucid, but has any progress been made 50 years on?
Drucker obviously left a lot of people orphaned: “We know little about how to improve knowledge workers’ performances, which is very unfortunate” (Process Management for Knowledge Work) but we come back to the same bottom lines.
“A much more appealing possibility is that a process orientation is beneficial to knowledge workers – that they would benefit from the discipline and structure that a process brings, while remaining free to be creative and improvisational when necessary and desirable”.
Back to square one, because in distinguishing different types of knowledge worker this same research work tells us:
“Collaboration” workers, who present a challenge for process-oriented managers. These workers typically have a more iterative, collaborative approach to work for which patterns are more difficult to discern. They may deny that their work has any structure at all – “every day is different,” they have often said to me.”
And always the same conclusion.
“Every effort to change how work is done needs a dose of both process – the design for how work is to be done – and practice, an understanding of how individual workers respond to the real world of work and accomplish their assigned tasks”
Fortunately, closer to home, researchers at INSEAD have taken their turn to dust off the subject, acknowledging that individuals should no longer be seen as mere variables in processes, but as key players in organizational performance. This research stresses the need to create systems that encourage skills development and autonomous decision-making (Putting People at the Centre of Operations).
To date, none of this has led to a concrete case study, but there are examples that are very similar in their inspiration, which is perhaps for the best: when it comes to managerial innovation, there comes a time when it’s important to avoid falling into endless dogmatic thinking and, on the contrary, to be pragmatic.
Real-life examples of People Centric Operations
You don’t have to look far to find an example of an organization built on an approach similar to People Centric Operations.
Indeed, with tribes and Squads, Spotify embodies the concept very well. For those who may have missed out on the extensive managerial literature on the subject, at Spotify squads are autonomous teams responsible for their own projects, with the aim of fostering collaboration and innovation (Spotify engineering culture (part 1) and (part 2)).
This approach enables us to maintain organizational agility in an ever-changing technological environment, and while some may feel that this is more organizational design than operations, the idea is very much the same.
If we go back further in time, we can also note that the manufacturing world had sought to find remedies for its shortcomings, something to which the world of work is reluctant. At Toyota, since the 50s, Kaizen has been encouraging employees to suggest improvements to the production line (What Really Makes Toyota’s Production System Resilient).
This may be a slight departure from PCO, which, in spirit, calls for real-time adaptation (logical, since there are no machines and no physical flow). Moreover, the aim was standardization, which is not totally the case in knowledge work (once again, the production logic and the material are different), but we’re on the same wavelength. Note that this is not a production management system, but a people management approach ! Proof that the two can be reconciled: rigor on the one hand, adaptability on the other.
Closer to home, there’s the revolution instigated by Satya Nadella at Microsoft, with its emphasis on inclusive leadership, continuous learning and agile collaboration (Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella). Nadella insists on the need to consider every employee as a source of innovation, and to strengthen the ability of teams to collaborate effectively and adopt a continuous improvement mentality.
And then, in the interests of intellectual honesty, we have to cite a counter-example. I’m talking of course about Holacracy at Zappos, although I could mention just about any business that claimed to be liberated. I had my doubts right from the start (Holacracy at Zappos : no boss or hierarchy. Really)and I was right. The approach was perceived as complex and sometimes confusing for employees, requiring intensive learning, and many employees left the company, unable to adapt to the new model.
This is exactly why I said we shouldn’t be dogmatic about this. The initial idea was certainly a good one, but its implementation was perceived as complex and sometimes confusing for employees, which is the exact opposite of the logic of simplification and flexibility we’re talking about.
Bottom line
The road to truly people-centric operations is still long and full of pitfalls. There is no shortage of ideas, and examples, though rare, show that pragmatic approaches can transform our organizations.
However, to move from reflection to action, we need to overcome resistance to change, break with certain dogmas and accept a certain amount of risk-taking.
The status quo is still firmly entrenched in many businesses, even in knowledge-based sectors where it is most inappropriate. But perhaps it’s the very nature of intangible production flows that makes any improvement complicated… if you can’t see it, you can’t improve it, unlike in a factory (The open space is not a factory but sometimes you should look at it that way).
Businesses that adopt simplicity, flexibility and trust as the pillars of their operations will have the opportunity to make the difference in the marketplace.
But the greatest risk today is to get lost in sterile thinking, when the urgency is real. Tomorrow’s organizations will be people-centric, or they will be inefficient and ineffective.
Image: agile process by VectorMine via Shutterstock
