Lesson Learned #18
Peter Drucker once wrote, “The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.” Over the years we have learned to appreciate and understand what he meant. When you start in consulting, you spend a lot of time watching people work. Hours upon hours of observing activities in a plant or in an office so that you can better understand how work flows through an organization. From this vantage point you also get to see the many problems that crop up through the day and how workers and managers interact to try to fix them.
One of the most fascinating things you learn, if you spend enough time watching people work, is that the problems will happen to them whether or not you are there (a point we made in an earlier Lessons Learned about “observations”). You learn that these repetitive and recurring problems eat up a significant portion of an average person’s day. Finally, you also learn that the person has little or no personal control over the problem. The root problem often resides in some upstream department or area. Information is missing or incorrect and so starts a chain of rework or duplicated effort to try to fix the issue. Fixing errors that occur somewhere else in the process is very common in many businesses. If the upstream department needs to change what they are doing, the employee cannot influence that, only the manager can.
Of course not all errors originate outside a department. But errors are never intentional. There may be a skills issue with some employees but that would also mean a training issue on the part of the manager. If a person needs training to improve their skills, they need a manager to provide or orchestrate that.
Sometimes you just have too many people working for the volume of work (restaurants, hotels, retail stores, and hospitals are good examples where this can easily happen). Matching supply and demand is difficult in many environments but it is not something an employee can control. Forecasting volume and scheduling resources to match the forecast is a manager’s job.
So how do you improve the productivity of work? Only the manager has the scope of control to affect any change that will have a meaningful impact on the workload of the line employee.
