"Scientific management focused on changes that would create efficient routines (p. 317)." My current job is perfect to illustrate this passage of the textbook. As a subdivision of Human Resources, my department is responsible for processing transactions - such as hires, separations, position creates, promotions, leave of absence, return of leave of absence, among others.
The Personnel Data Maintainers (PDMs) are the ones who handle these requests. So for every request we receive from our internal clients - managers and supervisors, we must follow a checklist to process them following what one once established as correct.
One of the negative aspects of blindly following these checklists is that they are rarely updated. Then, whoever is brand new to the PDM position can not perceive whether the information is updated or not. But they still want us to follow the checklist as if it was our bible.
The problem here is that sometimes what is considered efficient to one might not mean the same to another individual. While I understand that some standardization/routine is necessary to bring order to the organizations, I also believe in creative solutions. Clearly change is not so welcome in this department. In other words, it is what Frederick Taylor implied in his theory of systematically documenting inefficiencies: “change per se is not good".
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2 comments:
I agree with your statement that what seems efficient to one might not seem efficient to others. I have seen this happening many times in my life. Let’s take an example of migrating a set of reports from one server to another. My colleague argues that migrating reports one by one is a much efficient way of doing this task, whereas I find it more efficient doing the whole set one at a time. Now we both might be right in saying our statements according to our experiences and different ways we take to get a job done. So in my opinion everyone have their own efficient way of working on a task and he should not be interrupted in following that, even though the other task seems less time consuming but he might break something in taking that way because he is not confident about it.
Change in and of itself is not something that I advocate. In other words, change for the sake of change is not a way to operate an organization, and the larger the organization the more profound this is. Imagine an organization of 100 people, beholden to stakeholders of varying types, with policy and procedure changing by the week, along with the total freedom to process tasks in any desireable way. That would be anarchy. On the other hand, refusing to upgrade from type-set printing presses because "that's the way we've always done it" would be a terrible waste of time and energy. There is a sense of balance in tempering the intoxicating rush of changing things with the steady consistency of predictability.
I propose the use of the term updating, or modifying to change in many applications, because what is being proposed oftentimes is a modification to existing structures in order to promote efficiency and practicality. This way a change, or a modification, does not imply the breakdown of existing protocols, nor the retention of some archaic procedure ad nauseum.
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