The need for pride in work
In my late 20s I did a lot of reading. My job as a courier wasn’t mentally stimulating, so I was always consuming books about topics that interested me.
One day, I was looking for some cheap reading material in a bargain bin at London Drugs and I found a book, “Out of the Crisis” by W E Deming. At $1.99, I figured it was a good buy. I didn’t realize what a profound impact that book would have on my thinking about management and industry.
I didn’t know anything about Deming before reading the book. I later found out that he had been instrumental in guiding Japanese industry as it rebuilt after WWII. His ideas on management, quality and statistical reasoning were key to the phenomenal growth of Japan after the war.
However, Deming was an engineer, not a writer, and the prose of the book showed it. Clear and well-thought out? – yes. Fun to read? – not at all. It was tough slogging to get through the book, but he made so much sense that I had to read it all.
While Deming is known mostly as a statistician and someone whose ideas led to massive increases in manufacturing quality, the book spoke to me more about people and his philosophy on management and labour. I’ll write a few more posts on Deming’s philosophy of management (known as his 14 points) but his most revolutionary idea (in my view) was this – people want to work, and they have a right, actually a need, to be proud of their work.
This is diametrically opposed to the assumption in Western management that labour is inherently lazy. That they need to watched, and measured, and inspected, or else they will do shoddy work (or not work at all). Indeed, during my university days, studying Economics, we were told that the world was divided into Capital and Labour. Capital (money) doesn’t have a vote on how to be used, but Labour does, and has two options – work or leisure. And the assumption was always that Labour preferred leisure and needed wages as a bribe to do work of any kind.
Western management has had this ingrained assumption about labour for centuries. People need to be driven to do their work; they won’t work of their own accord. They don’t want to work, and given a chance, they’ll drop their tools and slack off.
You saw this management perspective sometimes during COVID, when most office workers had to work remotely. Many of these remote workers were forced to use key-loggers, video cameras and other invasive techniques to prove they were working. As the need for remote work has reduced after COVID, many business leaders are requiring attendance “in the office”, at least in part to ensure supervision.
Deming’s belief was opposite, and many real-world studies (for example, all of Japanese industry) has proven this out. He believed you don’t need labour oversight – just give people meaningful work in an environment that values them. The only thing that gets in their way is the system they work in (more on that in a later post). Because they want to do good work, work they can be proud of, they are willing to find and identify areas for improvement, if they are only asked. Management, Deming explained, should listen. And act.
The tool used for this feedback is called a Quality Circle, whose inventor credits Deming with the inspiration for the idea. It’s intended as a feedback loop, from an engaged worker group to an engaged leadership team, to lead to meaningful change. In a healthy organization, management is hungry for the input of front-line staff, because they are the only persons in the organization with firsthand knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. Again during COVID, many progressive companies found that remote workers (unsupervised) performed more and better work than in the office. Indeed, my own experience was that many people I worked with found themselves getting burned out because they had a hard time to stop working, with their work and home in the same place.
So, how’s your workplace? Does everyone have a voice? Are the front-line folks, who are often at the bottom of the totem pole, listened to? Respected? Does management eagerly seek out their voice?
