Independent work

Assembly line and job enrichment
The pressure for changes in the traditional ways of management of the employees and their working has been building up in the last few decades as the new class of employees has come into the work force and as the old motivating drives of hunger and fear have rapidly lost their power. The pressure has been greatest on the traditional assembly line of manufacturing industry. The traditional view has always been that the assembly line, by its very nature, is not capable of being run any other way than from the top and by command. However, this has been disproved long ago. Nothing which is now being proposed, for example, goes quite as far in demanding responsibility from the employee. The employee has to take responsibility when there is shortage of industrial engineers, supervisors, and managers.
An example can be given of one of the aircraft engine plants with a product which, by the any standards, was exceedingly complex and required high skill. Yet each team assembled one entire engine which was a product considerably more complex than any automobile engine. Each team organized the job slightly differently, with different employees doing different operations at different times. Each, however, started out with a foundation in work study and was supplied with full information. And each was engaged in continuous learning. It met several times a week with its foreman and with the engineering staff to discuss improvements in work and jobs. Each team exceeded, by substantial margins, the output standards which the engineers had suggested. These were the experiences, which have been forgotten.
This seems to reflect a temporary emergency rather than fundamentals. Now people are rediscovering the same principles again. And wherever tried, the results are the same. Among the most significant changes are those of the most rigid and most highly engineered line, the automobile assembly line.
The intensive studies of work, work group, and worker which had been made in the forties and fifties had reached and documented the same conclusions earlier. Other examples are in the United States, when Chrysler has experimented with responsibility on the part of the workers for assembly line operations. In a Chrysler plant in Detroit, employees were actually asked to re-evaluate the entire manufacturing operation as a result of which the whole plant was reorganized, resulting in higher output with fewer men.
The most systematic approaches to employee responsibility to automobile assembly line jobs are those taken by the two Swedish automobile makers, Saab and Volvo, both acting under the pressure of severe labour shortages. In one Swedish plant, one work group takes the responsibility for the assembly of the total car. The output standard, that is, the number of cars per hour, and the quality standard are set by the plant. The process has been worked out. But the structure of jobs, their scope, their relationship, and the organization of the work group are worked out by the employees themselves with their supervisors and the industrial engineer.
Other features of the Swedish experiment include the formation of development groups which include production employees and which discuss such matters as new tool and machine design before they are approved for construction, temporary assignment of the employees to a team of production engineers to work on specific production problems, and the shifting of responsibility for process inspection from a separate quality inspection unit to the production worker. The quality inspection unit now concentrates exclusively on the completed product. Finally, employees’ tasks have been expanded by the employees themselves to include maintenance of the equipment, which was previously the responsibility of special mechanics. There are more such examples.
In a big department-store chain responsibility for job design was turned over to the sales persons. Sales persons in this are on commission and competition among individuals was high. Yet the sales persons immediately tackled job design as a group problem, with the clear goal of optimizing every sales person’s opportunity to earn the maximum commission. They focused on the changes in the way the work, which were being done for helping all the people. They came up with a demand for continuous training in merchandising, in selling methods, in paper handling, and so on. What they wanted and got, by sitting down together a little time each week with an experienced expert from store operations or sales training to discuss their experiences and to suggest to each other whatever methods would work the best. They also came up with suggestions for changes in the way the selling floor was to be organized. The idea of having a person who handles the paperwork for all the salespeople in the department was one of their ideas, for example, and first tried by them.
But outside of the assembly line there is also growing demand for ‘job enrichment’. In job enrichment the expert, e.g., the industrial engineer defines the ‘modules’ of the work, the individual operations which have to be performed. He establishes the standards and analyzes the information the employee requires. But then the employee himself designs his job, that is, the number of modules that constitute his job, their sequence, speed, rhythm. The result is higher output, better quality, and a sharp drop in employee turnover. Job enrichment has so far been tried primarily in clerical operations. It seems, however, to be particularly applicable to knowledge work. Many organizations have been practicing job enrichment for a long time. The way claims settlement has been done for decades in some insurance organizations, is job enrichment pure and simple. Several organizations were practicing things, the way beyond anything job enrichment now tries to do. It has been known for a very long time. That it is now being heralded as a discovery is somewhat ironic, but harmless as long as it is being done.
But what is not so harmless is the belief that job enrichment is the answer. It is only a first step. For this energies of the work groups are needed to be mobilized. Job enrichment confines the employee’s responsibility to his own individual job. But he is also expected to assume responsibility for the work group, its relationship in and through the work process, its structure and its cohesion.