- People should be able to check their own work and correct errors on their own. "If you want to be sure the catcher misses baseballs, tell him there's someone behind him and not to worry."

Work itself can be a motivator. We have ignored this in discussions of wage rates and job rotation. . . . Job rotation is not job enrichment; you are saying, in effect, “We will let you out of jail if you're a good kid."

— In collaborating on job redesign, you have to deal with the worker's and supervisor's fears about what will happen to their status and future.

- "I don't have enough time" usually means that the work is laid out wrong.

-Jobs decay and get worse because of, among other things, fragmentation, job specifications, overtraining, measurement schemes, and deskilling (reducing the amount of preparation and orientation needed to do the job).

- Times have changed. What was a good challenge for an 11th grader in 1940 is not in 1970, but the job may not have been redesigned in the intervening 30 years.

- "We keep trying to sweeten up the relationship between the supervisor and the worker. The problem isn't there; it's in the work.... When the work is right and you know how it's laid out, people have time to be pleasant to each other.... Don't worry about having supervisors love their people. If people love their work, you'll get in on it free."

Mr. Ford emphasized repeatedly that the way in which change is brought about is more important than the specific details of job redesign: those involved in doing and supervising the work must arrive at their own decisions about the changes to be made, and take joint responsibility for putting these changes into effect. An important ingredient for success, therefore, is some form of worker participation.

Other Examples of Job Enrichment

David Whitsett, of Motivation Systems, offered an example from his experience with a claims-processing operation in an insurance company that illustrated the same principles. The workflow had been set up in such a way that the types of claims were sorted by individual work stations so that each clerk dealt most of the time with only one kind of claim application. And if any problems arose in individual cases, these were referred to supervision for handling. The assumption, following traditional industrial principles, was that if the work were categorized and the basic

82-847 - 7215

claims-processing job simplified, the highest possible productivity and lowest error rates would be obtained. Yet there were production and quality problems and much job dissatisfaction in the group.

The redesign effort began by analyzing all the types of claims being processed, from the simplest to the most complex, and by specifying what a worker would need to know to handle each type. It was discovered that many of the women processing the claims already had the necessary knowledge to handle these more complex types of claims. As a result, everything possible was put into the content of the jobs at the lowest level, including resolving of problems with the customer and taking care of difficulties that had previously been referred to a higher level. Mr. Whitsett told how these recommendations for change were regarded by work methods specialists in the company and what results were obtained when the changes were made in spite of their objections:

The methods people said, "You will lower productivity: they will make more mistakes because no one is checking their work. People won't like these jobs because they don't want complex jobs, and they will quit.” . . . The results were that gross productivity remained the same, but net productivity was up because errors went down. Customer complaints dropped off because the girls handled their own complaints rather than bucking them to the boss. And turnover, absenteeism, and lateness dropped.

Still another example, from experience in a public mental hospital in Pennsylvania, was described by Michael Johnson (Pennsylvania's AFLCIO). In this instance the enrichment was made with the job of attendant. Ninety-five percent of the attendants were black, and the work was regarded as the lowest status and worst paid employment in the local area. A training program on the job stressed professionalism, the attendant's responsibility for the patient, his therapeutic role, and recognition of his importance to the success of hospital operations. Results included sharp reduction in turnover, absenteeism, pilfering of hospital property, and abuse or neglect of patients. Costs per patient day went down, and food and other aspects of institutional care improved. Attendants started informal groups to involve the more withdrawn patients in activities. And when a new collective bargaining agreement was negotiated, a clause in the contract stated that the attendant is responsible for the patient.

All of the examples concerned the redesign of individual jobs or jobs of a similar type within existing organizations, with little or no change in the surrounding organizational structure or other aspects of the work environment. The conference also discussed redesign efforts and other types of planned change that focused on larger units: departments, divisions, occasionally total plants, and in some instances the community and its institutions such as education and government.

The Systems Approach: Focus on the Organization

An overview of what is being done at the departmental, plant, or organizational level - so far only in a small number of firms - was provided by Fred Foulkes of the Harvard School of Business Administration. He described the use of work improvement principles in new plants and in rearrangements of existing organizations. "Less than 50 companies, and probably more like 40, have as yet done anything like this," Mr. Foulkes said, adding that the instances he knew about were for the most part in nonunion firms. He mentioned five examples of new plants: a General Foods plant in Topeka, Kansas (described in greater detail at Williamsburg and summarized below); Olin and Procter and Gamble plants in Augusta; Corning Glass and Polaroid facilities in Massachusetts. Each new plant is conceived of as both a social and a technological system, in which those who are to be involved in operating the plant participate as early as possible in the design and development of the facility and share in the determination of work arrangements, the content of individual jobs, and the development of personnel and compensation policies. Other common features include:

The building of work teams for operations problemsolving and planning.

- Much time devoted to meetings and coffee sessions for goalsetting and exchange of information.

-The design of jobs to maximize the chances for personal involvement and organizational cohesiveness.

All this leads to the individual employee's being encouraged to exercise his initiative - taking action based on circumstances at the time and his knowledge of the business and checking less with higher authority. In these new plants the compensation system is also apt to be constructed or adapted to reduce the number of job classifications and provide more meaningful promotions. Usually those who are going to run the plant also plan it (both social and technical aspects) with an outside consultant skilled in group dynamics and organizational development. And they usually have the advantage of being insulated from the traditional climate and practices of the parent organization (although problems can arise after the plant is operating when people transfer in from the parent company, who have not had the experience of developing the plant from scratch).

In the second type of systems approach - dealing with already existing organizations - Mr. Foulkes mentioned a few of the various techniques that have been tried. Such redesign or modification programs, he said, typically begin in the personnel department or in training, work

simplification, or engineering staff groups, but line management support and active involvement are required for success.

Job rotation is one of the approaches used, sometimes with a “sandwich" plan in which some time is spent on the current job and some on the next job. When a person has adapted to the new job and has learned it, he often is reluctant to return to his previous assignment. Thus job rotation may be a kind of one-way street, and the company still has the problem of filling the entry-level or less interesting jobs.

Another variant is to run a jobposting or internal bidding system in which openings, "career exposure plans," are announced and people bid on new jobs.

Vertical job enlargement is still another approach; this involves more of a systems focus than lateral enlargement or enrichment because levels of responsibility may be combined and supervisory as well as worker responsibilities change.

The main conclusions from these types of redesign programs, according to Mr. Foulkes, are:

The restructuring should be accompanied by or anchored in an organizational development program, including changes in management attitudes and practices.

There are some barriers to innovation: resistance from some employees who don't want more challenging jobs; general organizational policies or existing practices that conflict with the new approach; technological difficulties (though these are less than often supposed); and management resistance. (The manager or supervisor, for example, may wonder what his role would be if employees were given increased responsibility and more power to make decisions.) The key ingredients for success appear to be:

-Top management support and active involvement.

The use of consultants or change agents, both internal and external to the organization.

-Some early success experiences to build confidence and encourage continued experimentation.

- A commitment to the new approach as a way of life, not just a gimmick (here day-to-day company actions and other nonverbal communications are apt to outweigh verbal statements of intent and other programmatic fanfare).

The main current need that Mr. Foulkes sees is an intensive effort to get more such approaches going in both new and existing situations in a much larger number of firms, particularly unionized firms. To meet com

petition and deal with rising costs, some of these approaches should be tried, he suggested.

Yet, more significant is the damage to the quality of life caused by dull and demeaning work, while in other community institutions people are seeking to take more initiative and exercise more freedom, Mr. Foulkes said. Regarding the enormity of the problem, he said: "There are some 2.4 million dead-end jobs, with little chance to exercise judgment or to advance."7

In conclusion, Mr. Foulkes said:

Employee expectations are indeed changing. Eighty percent of the people at AT&T hired last year were born after World War II. [Managements] are losing their right to be arbitrary, and that includes the arbitrary assignment of work to people.

Later discussion at the conference took sharp issue with some of Mr. Foulkes' generalizations. Mr. Whitsett, for example, said that six of 14 recent programs in which he has been involved were in unionized plants; and that when existing arrangements are being altered in this broader scale approach, unions are and will be involved more often than not. The real issue raised by Mr. Foulkes' remarks was broader, and did not surface until there was a general discussion later in the meeting of both the job-centered and organization-centered efforts to change work content. As reported below, the issue of union and management attitudes and motives in either advocating or resisting job enrichment or a systems approach to organizational change became a focus of considerable debate.

The General Foods Topeka Plant

First, however, one session of the conference was spent in a more detailed presentation of a development program in a new continuous-processtechnology Pet Foods plant in Topeka designed and installed by General Foods in ways intended to challenge traditional industrial practice. The project is noteworthy in that the final plant design was a product of two years of intensive planning with major inputs from social as well as physical and engineering specialists.

Lyman Ketchum and Edward Dulworth of General Foods outlined the assumptions underlying the design and development of the new plant's technology and social organization. Mr. Ketchum, formerly Pet Foods

"In the Sheppard study, two-thirds of the male blue-collar workers saw little or no chance to get ahead on their current job. This does not mean, however, that these workers were all upset by their limited mobility chances. Among those stating little or no chance to get ahead, 45 percent were rarely or never bothered by their restricted chances.