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The modern concern with managing workers comes from the industrial revolution.
Industrialization causes a massive shift away from farming and
small scale household production.
Literally cottage industries.
To industrial work and factories and other work places.
Depending on where you live,
this transition may have occurred 200 years ago or is occurring right now.
But the changes and the implications for workers and managers are the same.
It's important that we understand the profound nature of these changes.
Industrialists displaced household as the controller of the production process.
So individuals lost the autonomy and the discretion to decide when and how to work.
How to structure their work tasks.
When to do them.
Where they were going to work.
And income also now becomes individually based rather than household based.
Finally, women's unpaid caring work was rendered invisible
as new norms equated valuable work to paid work done outside of the home.
1:11
Now early industrialists believed that they needed to impose strict
discipline and closely monitor this workforce that wasn't used to working for
someone else in a factory.
And so the foreman, the supervisor, really became king.
This is a system that we now refer back to as the Foreman's Empire,
where the supervisor had the unquestioned authority to hire,
to fire, to discipline, to assign work, to assign work hours.
And to motivate workers.
And how are workers motivated?
Through strict monitoring and the drive system.
Threats, cajoling, profanity even, pointing to the factory gate.
Pointing to all those unemployed workers willing to take their job if they weren't
willing to do exactly what the foremen wanted.
Now, after this,
there's an effort to try to systematize management as the production process
becomes more complicated and factories get larger and more complex.
Now this didn't all pertain to human resources, but part of it did.
And perhaps the most famous example that still endures today is scientific
management or Taylorism.
After my distant cousin,
Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was really at the forefront of this movement.
Now Taylorism, or
scientific management, sought to find the one best way to do every job.
Break every job down into small, standardized,
repetitive tasks that any unskilled worker could do.
For example,
Taylor spent four months figuring out that the optimal shovel size was 21 pounds.
Not 20 pounds, not 22 pounds, but 21 pounds.
And so therefore, these jobs were broken down into small,
standardized tasks that unskilled workers could do.
And who was it that was determining how to break these jobs down?
It wasn't workers.
No, it was managers.
They were seen as the ones who had all of the knowledge.
What were workers?
Workers were just cogs in machine.
They were just hands, farm hands, factory hands, deck hands.
You know the phrase, all hands on deck.
3:12
Now around the same time, there was also an effort to apply psychological
principles to managing workers.
So this wasn't seen as only trying to get the technical conditions of work right,
but also to get the human conditions right.
Focus on appreciating that workers have different skills and
levels of cognitive ability.
Focus on the fact that job satisfaction, what we now call employee engagement, and
other attitudes are important for how work gets done and how productive workers are.
And also appreciate that group dynamics in the workplace
are also an important factor.
And this really is the key task of any manager today.
Not only to get the economic and technical conditions right, but
also to get the human conditions right.
3:56
Now as we look back over this 5,000 year history
of the evolution of human resource practices.
It's important not to simply see this as an evolution of practices, but
also to see this as an evolution of ideas.
When slaves and conscripts were managed in very hierarchical, authoritarian ways this
was rooted in assumptions that the elites of the time were absolutely superior.
In every way to slaves and conscripts, and therefore they had the right, sometimes
even the divine right, to manage the workers that they saw as inferior to them.
Fast forward several thousand years ago, and the early Industrial Revolution,
when workers were managed in very hierarchical authoritarian ways.
This was rooted in a set of assumptions which owners thought that they had
particular qualities that gave them their place in society.
They were industrialists, they were top of society because they were ambitious, they
were thrifty, they were sober, and they saw workers as lacking these qualities and
therefore needed to be managed in very strict, hierarchical authoritarian ways.
We add in Taylorism, a new set of assumptions come to the fore.
Workers now are seen as motivated by money, and they're willing to work to get
money, but they want to do it in the most efficient way.
And who is going to determine the most efficient way?
Managers.
Because it's assumed that managers know best.
We add in psychological and sociological theorizing, to the problem of
how to best manage workers and now we add in a new set of assumptions about workers,
that not only are they motivated by money, but they have psychological differences.
They have psychological needs, social relationships, also important.
So we have this evolution, not only of practices, but also ideas.
And as you're managing people,
keep track of your own assumptions that you're making when managing others.
So there's a number of key learnings that we can
pull out of this quick review of the history of human resource management.
How to manage people is a very old challenge.
If you're finding it tough, you're not alone.
Working for somebody else on their schedule, using methods and
tasks that somebody else has set for them is a very difficult thing for many people.
It's not how most people have lived for most of human history.
Remember this when managing others.
Also, we can see quite clearly that people management strategies change over time.
And ideas matter as much as practices.
So remember this when you're thinking about your own practices and
your own ideas.
And think about our current strategies that you're using,
being encouraged to use, used by others in your organization.
Are they out of date?
Not only in terms of the practices, but in terms of the assumptions and
the ideas that lie behind them.
And finally, it's clear, you have choices.
Be an innovator as a manager.
John W. BuddProfessor and Director
