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(Continue from last week)
GOOD management is the key to increased labor
productivity in companies. It ensures not only that companies are
financially sustainable but also that they are fit for human beings
to work in. Unfortunately, while companies want to grow financially,
they do it by limiting worker-judgment as much as possible. Common
management practice is so controlling and oppressive that it fails
to inspire commitment and value-adding creativity from workers. The
mentality of management was captured by Henry Ford’s classic
complaint: “Why is it that every time I ask for a pair of hands, a
brain comes attached?” Under such dehumanizing leadership, workers
learn to drag themselves to the workplace more out of necessity than
from any belief that they can make a difference.
But people do make a difference, and good
managers know this well. The basic principles for bringing out the
best in workers were laid down by writers on humanistic management
decades ago and they harped on two crucial elements: personally
meaningful growth and the opportunity to contribute ideas.
Douglas McGregor, writing in The Human Side of
Enterprise, explained that “the essential task of management is to
arrange organizational conditions and methods of operation so that
people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own
efforts toward organizational objectives.”
In the US, Whole Foods is a master of helping
people grow and achieve their own goals. A nearly 200-store, $6
billion-a-year retailer of natural and organic foods, the company is
not only dedicated to selling food that is good for people, but also
managed in a way that helps its workers grow in freedom and
accountability. The company’s workers (“associates”) make
decisions about staffing, pricing, ordering, and in-store promotion.
As a result, each store has a unique mix of products and the company
grows at nearly triple the industry average.
Compliance-oriented managers are not keen on
getting ideas from workers. They fear that this will harm
operational discipline and, worse, may lead workers to think that
they know more than the bosses. This self-limiting view leads to
much lost opportunity to really engage workers. Toyota, arguably one
of the most operationally disciplined companies in the world, has a
well-developed system for enabling workers to continuously propose
ideas for improving product quality and work processes. Over the
forty years that Toyota has been implementing its employee
suggestion system, the company has yielded 20 million improvement
ideas or about an average of one suggestion per employee a week.
What is most remarkable is that the company has implemented 99
percent of these ideas! Many managers hardly ever ask employees for
improvement ideas, much less implement them. Such managers simply
expect workers to follow rules and SOPs.
In essence, managers elevate productivity by
enabling committed workers to create more value by, first, improving
products and services such that customers want them more (more
revenues) and, second, by improving work processes so that products
and services can be delivered more efficiently (less cost).
Unfortunately, most companies increase sales mainly through
marketing and reduce costs by keeping worker pay low or simply
reducing head count altogether. With such an approach, what role can
worker involvement and creativity have? I only hope that enough
enlightened managers assert themselves soon enough to save the
countless Filipino workers who languish under quasi-feudal
management. This will release the pent-up productivity that our
country needs to finally achieve the development we seek.
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Dr. Ben Teehankee is the Sen. Benigno Aquino,
Jr. Associate Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility and
Chairman of the human resource management department of the De La
Salle Professional Schools Ramon V. del Rosario Sr. Graduate School
of Business. He may be emailed at teehankeeb@yahoo.com
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