Idea in Brief
The Trend
For four decades the belief in worker empowerment has been ascendant. But in recent years a movement to optimize labor has been gaining strength. It treats labor as a commodity and strives to cut it to a minimum by using automation and software, tightly controlling how people do their jobs, and replacing employees with contract and gig workers.
Causes for Concern
There is no evidence that this new form of “scientific management” is an improvement. By taking responsibility away from workers, companies demotivate them, undermining their productivity and innovative contributions.
The Better Alternative
Don’t choose optimization over empowerment. Instead, make an effort to find the right mix of the two, as the highly successful “lean production” approach has. The notion that you can treat people like machines is dangerous.
The long march toward enlightened management is typically seen as beginning in the 1930s, when researchers and, more important, corporate leaders began to abandon the assumption that workers should be treated like machines and required to perform tasks according to precisely engineered specifications. They started to embrace the belief that business performance would improve if employees were actually involved in work decisions. For decades the camp that favored empowering employees grew. But now there are strong signs that the pendulum is swinging the other way—that the old engineering model is reasserting itself with gusto. And that’s cause for deep concern.