Independent work

Planning and doing
The above three basics, (i) productive work, (ii) feedback information, and (iii) continuous learning, are, so to speak, the planning for employee responsibility for job, work group, and output. Hence, these are management responsibilities and management tasks. But these are not ‘management prerogatives’, i.e., things done by the management alone, by itself, and unilaterally. Management does indeed have to do the work and make the decisions. But in all these areas the employee himself, from the beginning, needs to be integrated as a ‘resource’ into the planning process. From the beginning, he has to share in thinking through work and process, tools and information. His knowledge, his experience, his needs are resource to the planning process. The employee needs to be a partner in it. Every attempt is to be made to make accessible to the employee the necessary knowledge. He need not become an industrial engineer or a process designer, but the fundamentals of industrial engineering and their application to a man’s own job and work can be grasped by almost anyone without great difficulty.
One of the first attempts to make employees a resource in making work productive was ‘work simplification’. It stated that for the scientific management to be successful, supervisors are to understand its principles, can apply them themselves, and can teach them to their own employees. For this, scientific management is to become a simple, every day, comfortable tool of the employee’s group itself. It is normally seen that unskilled employees who, however, knew what working is, can obtain results as good as those of the most highly trained industrial engineer.
There is no reason why work simplification is to be taught at a special institute and away from the work place. In Japanese industry, beginning with the first application of scientific management in the 1920s, employees have learned the principles of industrial engineering as a matter of course in the continuous-training sessions.
Employee responsibility for job, work groups, and output cannot he expected, let alone demanded, until the foundations of productive work, feedback information, and continuous learning has been recognized. Employee participation in assigning these foundations is to be brought into play from the very beginning.
Creativity, if by that is meant undirected, unstructured, untaught, and uncontrolled guessing, is not likely to produce results. But a system which does not tap and put to use the knowledge, experience, resources, and imagination of the employees who have to live with the system and make it work is as unlikely to be effective.
This is not seen usually, mainly because of a confusion of planning and doing with the planner and doer. In fact, planning and doing are two different things. Planning does not get done if it is mixed in with doing. Planning is to be a separate task. The two are separate activities and require different methods and different approaches. But planner and doer are required to be united in the same person. They cannot be separated, or else, the planning ceases to be effective and becomes a threat to performance. The planner is required to supply the doer with direction and measurements, with the tools of analysis and synthesis, with methodology, and with standards. He is also required to make sure that the planning of one group is compatible with the planning of the others. But in turn, the planner requires the doer as his resource and as his feedback control.
Also unless the planner knows what the doer is doing and what he requires, his planning, while theoretically correct, may never become execution. Equally, unless the doer understands what the planner tries to accomplish, the doer is not going to perform or try to resist performance specifications that to him seem unreasonable, arbitrary, or just plain silly. And the less capable the planner is of analyzing the work and its individual operations, the more does he depend on the doer. In knowledge work, above all, the doer has to take a responsible part in the planning process for it to be effective at all. But still, the foundation for employees’ responsibility is planning and hence is the responsibility of the management,