Joy at Work. Dennis W. Bakke
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ran a story celebrating the person who had won a contest for his design of a gas-powered model airplane. It turned out that the young man in the library was one of the most brilliant aeronautical designers in the entire country.
Why do so many people work so hard so they can escape to Disneyland? Why are video games more popular than work? Why is driving an automobile more exciting and enjoyable to many people than their work? Why do rank-and-file employees generally spend less time at work than top executives? Why do many workers spend years dreaming about and planning for retirement? The reason is simple and dispiriting. We have made the workplace a frustrating and joyless place where people do what they’re told and have few ways to participate in decisions or fully use their talents. As a result, they naturally gravitate to pursuits in which they can exercise a measure of control over their lives.
In most organizations I have been exposed to around the world, bosses and supervisors still make all important decisions. The more important the decision, the more important the boss assigned to make the call. This is especially true of decisions that have financial implications. We still have the offices “above” the working people, filled with staff (some with “green eyeshades”) and supervisors who, without consulting workers, make decisions that dramatically affect their lives. Many layers of bosses and assistant bosses control the behavior and performance of the people below them.
In the past three decades, there has been a proliferation of staff specialists who oversee almost every aspect of corporate life. Many of their names and missions have an Orwellian ring: engineering services, human resources, training, environmental control, strategic planning, legal affairs, finance, risk management, accounting, internal auditing, internal communications, public affairs, investor relations, community relations, production control, quality control.
As a line executive responsible for the Energy Conservation Program in the federal government during the early 1970s, I experienced the debilitating effects of these “serving” central staff groups. It seemed as if I had 15 bosses. Each one of the offices was responsible for something I thought was essential to operating my program. My budget was the responsibility of the budget department. When an issue regarding energy conservation legislation or inquiries concerning my program came from Capitol Hill, the staff of the assistant secretary for legislation took the lead. People like me couldn’t even testify before a congressional committee without an entourage of people concerned that I might say something related to their areas of responsibility.
Workers get paid for the hours they work and, curiously, get extra pay if it takes them longer than a colleague to complete a job.
As the executive in charge of the program, I was not really trusted to operate it or to speak freely about it. It was almost as if I didn’t have a job. At best, my “line” job was about coordinating all the “staff” people who drifted in and out of my program. It is easy to understand why a Collin Doherty could become disenchanted with his workplace.
Basic compensation schemes have not changed significantly either. Workers get paid for the hours they work and, curiously, get extra pay if it takes them longer than a colleague to complete a job. Supervisors and other leaders get paid a basic salary according to their responsibilities, regardless of the time spent performing them. They are usually eligible for bonuses and increasingly participate in ownership benefits as well. As has been the case for nearly three centuries, most organizations employ only two significant “classes” of people—management (variously called executives, leaders, supervisors, directors, and officers) and labor. Discrimination against labor by management is more subtle today than it was during the Industrial Revolution, but it remains demeaning and destructive.
Workers are still “trained” in the narrow function they are expected to perform. Most bosses, however, acquire broader expertise through schooling or doing stints in a variety of jobs. Most organizational leaders still believe a detailed job description for every employee is essential to a smoothly performing operation. In most firms, “control” systems pushed by auditors and managers limit each person’s ability to make decisions on spending the company’s money. The amount is set at zero or near zero for the lowest employees on the organizational ladder. This number usually climbs with each layer of supervision. At the top, the executive director, president, or CEO can often make a decision to spend millions of dollars, and the board of directors or trustees have leeway to spend even more. When it comes to financial matters, average employees and lower-level supervisors enjoy the same level of trust as they did in the 19th century.
“Human resources” has a dehumanizing connotation.
The nomenclature of business also remains largely the same. Labor or labor costs, personnel or personnel departments, are all in common use. Economists still put people in an economic formula (labor plus material plus capital equals production). In effect, people (labor) are simply variables like money and material. Similarly, the label “human resources” has a dehumanizing connotation. We have financial resources, fuel resources, and human resources.
In reading annual letters by CEOs, I have noticed that when an organization wants to make a positive statement about its employees, the letter often says something like, “Our people are our best assets.” After I used similar language in one of my annual letters, I had second thoughts about using the word “assets” to describe people in my company. What do we do with assets? We use them. We buy and sell them. We depreciate them. When they are used up, we dispose of them. I vowed that I would never again use that word to describe the people in my organization. I don’t even like the word “employee” because it has a lingering association with the demeaning workplaces of the Industrial Revolution. (I reluctantly use the word “employee” in this book because it is familiar to readers—so familiar, in fact, that most have never given its connotation a second thought.)
Earlier, I noted that most of the recent books written on organizational success treat uniquely human factors—principles and values, for instance—as nothing more than techniques to achieve wealth and success. The behavior of people is equated with the cost of raw materials and plant equipment. One bestselling book a few years ago was Re-Inventing the Corporation. Invention is a word usually associated with machines or processes, yet much of the book is about the people who work in corporations. How do you reinvent them? Even more problematic from my perspective was the title of another bestselling book, Re-engineering the Corporation. Engineering is a word almost exclusively related to machines, but here again the book was primarily about people and the structure in which they work.
Many business leaders are far more concerned with the tasks people perform than with the people themselves. As Henry Ford famously quipped, “Why is it I get a whole person when all I want is a good pair of hands?”
Several years ago in China, I was visiting with three young women employed by AES. All three had returned to their homeland after attending Ivy League schools in the United States. They told me how in each case their parents had made the decision for them about which school to attend and what classes to take, even though none of their parents had ever attended a college or even traveled outside of China. The parents had treated their grown daughters as small children.
We turn things upside down in the United States. When our children are young, we (wrongly, I believe) let them pick their friends, their schools, their clothes, their movies and music, even their religion, assuming they choose any faith at all. By contrast, when they go to work, their bosses tell them what to do, how to do it, and when.
When I attended business school in the late ’60s, a good deal of pioneering research had been done on how employees respond to different conditions in the workplace. In cynical moments I characterized most of this research with the phrase, “Be nice to the ‘machines’ and they will produce more for you.” That said, many experts over the past 50 years have argued that we should replace outmoded assumptions about workers and fundamentally change the workplace.
Indeed, most thoughtful people today reject the assumptions about working people that guided business leaders at the time of the Industrial Revolution. We understand more about what makes people grow and learn and enjoy work. We have experienced political and individual freedom and love it. Most of us believe that every individual is unique and valuable.