Taylorism or Tailorism?

It’s been almost a century since the publication of The Principles of Scientific Management. Is there a new Frederick Winslow Taylor, a student of knowledge worker scientific management?

There are a number of drivers in knowledge work and a number of reasons why Taylor’s approach does not work well in this area. For example, there are cost savings arguments to standardization in more complex organizations. Contributing to this is lower employee tenure. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average employee tenure fell since 1996 (from the BLS study “Median years of tenure with current employer for employed wage and salary workers by age and sex, selected years, 1996-2006”). Tenures decreased the most for employee ages 35-44 (a drop of 7.5% to 4.9 years), ages 45-54 (a drop of 12% to 7.3 years), and ages 55-64 (a drop of 8.8% to 9.3 years). When employees change employers more frequently, they must spend more time ramping up in order to add value in their new organization. It would seem that lower tenures add to the benefits of process standardization for knowledge workers.

But there is a limit to how deeply an organization of knowledge workers will want to standardize processes. The problem is that knowledge work tends to be less easily compartmentalized and that knowledge workers, like the manual workers of Taylor’s factories, often resent being told how to do their jobs, especially as it may make them feel like cogs.

What do the stakeholders -- the organization, the employees, the customers – gain and lose from a process-heavy approach? To the organization: possible gains in productivity but less flexibility to act on creative ideas that produce future productivity gains. To the employees: possible improvements in efficiency in some tasks but lower job satisfaction, depending on disposition. To the customers: perhaps lower prices, but possibly less customized service.

Then I thought of my old tailor from when I was based in Hong Kong. His business was incredibly customer-centric. I would stop by his shop, have a cup of tea, talk about work, look at some fabric, talk about suit styles, talk about the family and then make a purchase decision. A very long, inconsistent and inefficient process. Behind the scenes, cutting cloth and sewing, he may have been efficient, but to the customer he gave a personal and, well, tailored series of interactions. I’d say that to some degree the knowledge worker is a customer of his/her employer.

Maybe not all of what passes as inefficiency is true loss.