"The system must be first": The joys of scientific management

Care to guess how many times the author has blatantly called employees stupid throughout the book? Yes, I did count 😉

And yet, it does provoke critical reflections on how we perceive work today.

The quick and dirty

Title: The Principles of Scientific Management / Frederick Winslow Taylor

One sentence about the book: A somewhat controversial theory in our day and age, but as Bob Marley put it, "In this great future, you can't forget your past"

The book in one sentence: The codification of a highly known approach to improve production efficiency in a systematic manner

Reading recommendation (yes/no/must): No, mainly as it's a tedious read

Controversial management philosophy

The goal of scientific management is to secure maximum prosperity for both the employer and the employees. Sounds inspiring, right? To achieve this state, a mind-shift is needed: "in the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first".

Starting to see why it's considered controversial? Let's dig a bit deeper.

At the heart of Taylorism (named after the author, a synonym for Scientific Management) is the belief that people will deliberately try to be less productive, committing "the greatest evil of working". This precedes motivation Theory X, which expanded on this outlook further. Workers are compared to machines and should be used to the limits of their physical capacity.

How's that for more motivation for you?

With that in mind, the employer needs to create a set of rules that look to maximize a person's physical output during a day's work. The rules detail the exact body movements the employee should make, and it's the manager's role to ensure the worker follows them to a tee.

"the very first requirement for a man who is fit to handle pig-iron as a regular occupation that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make up the ox than any other type"

Employees are depicted as stupid, ignorant, and passive. They are only second to the methods and should avoid using their mind entirely. They seek no meaning while at work and only care about their pay. Monetary incentive is, therefore, the only way to induce productivity.

If it sounds to you a lot like conditioning a pet to do something, you're not alone. On second thought, this might be even too demeaning for a pet.

Treating employees like the office pet (photo by Marek Szturc on Unsplash)

The movie exposition

Masterclass.com describes exposition as the "background information the audience needs to know for the world of your story to make sense". Let me set the mood for you then.

The book describes the insights and methodologies that Taylor perfected since about 1880 and until the book's publication in 1911. It examines a world of large-scale manufacturing involving great physical labor following the industrial revolution.

As with any change to a working environment, iterations and improvements were indeed needed, but have not yet taken place. Ford's assembly line, for example, has not yet been invented. The same goes for the Bureaucratic Management Theory, which introduced many things we are all familiar with, such as hierarchical organizations, defined processes, governance, etc.

Some of the gems mentioned in the book include:

People now wear shoes all the time, while not so long ago they walked mainly barefoot
Child labor is a common practice where poor girls work 10.5 hours a day
Workers’ salaries range between $1-2 dollars a day

The case studies where the benefits were recorded touched jobs such as shoveling coal or sand from one pile to another, loading chunks of iron on carts, etc.

The role of leaders in scientific management

Do not mistake scientific management with cruelty. As the name suggests, it does lean on an investigation of work and analysis of ways to improve it. There are actual principles in play here.

First, qualified and educated individuals (such as the author) need to check how workers do their job, what movements they do, how long it takes them, and what is their output. Work is broken down into the smallest bite-size pieces. On some occasions, experimentation is needed to evaluate the ideal conditions to improve output (adapting tools, changing the work environment, pushing the workers to their limits, etc.).

Once the baseline is established, the one ideal way to do the job is formulated.

Putting it into practice, the following steps most often take place:

Strong workers are offered higher pay if they can meet the new yield threshold
A trainer is teaching the worker what he needs to do to reach this benchmark
Tasks are given to the employee every day on a note, including a description of what needs to be done and how, as well as feedback on the previous day's work
The manager (foreman) is in charge of making sure workers follow the rules and methodology

In addition, a bureaucratic organization should be created by introducing roles that are not producing output. Among these positions are clerks, planners, trainers, timekeepers, physical motion analysts, tool analysts, documentation, inspectors, repair boss, disciplinarian (HR equivalent), and others.

Employees are expendable. It's survival of the fittest, and those who can't produce to the standards are replaced with new workers.

There has to be something positive to take away, right?

There are surprisingly a few concepts that, with the right adaptations to our times, are inspirational. The actual principles of scientific management, on the surface, are quite uplifting:

Leaders should not accept something just because "this is how we always did it" - instead we should analyze, think critically, experiment
The company and employees should work together towards mutual benefit and prosperity
Hire the best talent
Train employees, so they can maximize their potential

By improving workers' efficiency, the author hopes to increase demand and thus hopefully mitigate poverty. following his methodology, workers' wages should grow, costs of goods sold will decrease and customers will buy more.

On one side, the premise that the distribution of work should be such that management does the thinking while the employee does the working is outrageous. On the flip side, it's not a stretch to say that the general notion behind it is that management's purpose is to enable their team members to thrive at work.

Some other intentional benefits are shorter working hours and pay increases based on merit.

Self-reflection: Is it that different than how your organization work today?

Maybe scientific management is actually good for you

Taylorism is not a complete no-no. if you are in the mass-manufacturing, fast pace, business there are some principles for you to use even in the 21st century. In some industries, it is a necessity to improve the way and speed at which work gets done. From breaking down tasks to their smallest piece, to increase speed, to training workers and assuring quality.

This, by any means, is not an excuse to treating your employees like machines or pets. Do not over-work your team, do allow them to socialize, and encourage them to bring up improvement suggestions.

Regardless of the business setting, workers should have ownership and accountability for their produce. The practice of self-reflection and evaluation of one's work is key.

Take Jaipur Rugs, for example. The traditional rugs manufacturer from India has introduced self-management elements to their production process, replacing traditional roles which were only supervising and not producing. Once workers were put in charge of evaluating their own work quality, they were able to still limit mistakes while also minimizing the bureaucracy in the production process.

Is your team or organization suffering from extra bureaucracy?

As much as we'd like to think that we are forward-thinking, regardless of how many inspiring leadership books we read, I'd go on a limb here and say that 99.9% of organizations are very much hierarchical. Remember the new bureaucratic roles that were introduced earlier? Here's another look at them in comparison to some roles and tools that are common these days. Looks familiar?

Bureaucratic roles per scientific management and similarities to today’s organizations

Weird, right?

An alternative to bureaucracy is hard to find, especially in larger organizations. Here are a few questions to ask yourself in an attempt to reduce red tape and improve agility and innovation in your company or team:

Do you ask yourself why can't your team be more creative or why can't they see the bigger picture?
Is your calendar packed with status-update meetings? How many project-specific Slack channels are you in?
How many processes do you have in place? Could you do with less or are these absolutely necessary?
Who came up with the processes? your team or were they decided top-down by the manager?
How detailed are your processes and best practices? Are they principles or step-by-step to-do lists?
What's the ratio of your documentation compared to work that creates value for customers? Any chance you can document less and shift more focus to delivering impact?
Does your team really need all the tools they're using?
Is there a need for a hyper-specialized individual in every position, or can one person assume multiple responsibilities in similar fields?
What's the scope of your team's decision-making? Can more responsibilities be handed over to you from your supervisor, while meeting some guardrails or boundaries?

Are your employees task executors

I am sure you were appalled reading that workers should just work, while managers should be the ones to think. But let me ask you this: do you do enough to encourage your team members to improve their work and increase their range of knowledge and skills?

When employees cannot step away from their day-to-day tasks, we can't expect them to reflect on their work, learn and proactively introduce improvements. We also deprive them of the opportunity to understand the bigger picture or to connect to a higher company purpose.

Deliberately allow your team to experience work differently:

Invite stakeholders to teach your team something outside of their expertise
Implement OKRs and allow collaboration and transparency between teams
Use pair programming principles also outside of software teams
Have team members join other teams' rituals - for example, ask your creative folks to join a product sprint planning session, or your developers to join the sales team pipeline review
Ask stakeholders from other teams to join ideation workshops that your team holds
Trust your team members to lead change or projects, even if they are not the ones in the execution role
Proactively and deliberately prompt your team to suggest improvements and aim to cultivate open feedback culture
Give your team a goal, an expected outcome, and not a list of tasks

How do you treat your talent?

Our team members are the key to what we do. We should evaluate our practices carefully and honestly.

Do you treat your candidates as humans or as moving parts on an assembly line? Do you cold-call them or schedule time in advance, do reply to their emails and provide feedback, are you forthcoming about salaries, do you check the candidate experience frequently?
Do you hire for an exact job description or for the best talents in that area?
Do you pay for motivation or for prosperity? Do you expect people to do more when you give them incentives or do you pay a fair amount that allows employees to focus both at work and home?
Have you had talks with your team members about what's important for them at work and do they feel they're on the right path?
Is your training/"education" a percentage of employees' salary? is it enough to pay for proper training?
Is your training balancing current skill needs as well as future needed skills?
Do your team members know exactly what you and their peers perceive as their strengths and weaknesses? Do they know for sure how content you are with their job? Do you praise them publicly?

I owe you an answer

Remember my prompt from the beginning of this article, asking you to guess how many times the author referred to employees as stupid? Thanks to Kindle, it's pretty easy to search and count 😉

The answer is 4 (ignoring other words which have similar meaning):