into business with her husband. For more than an hour she poured out her
anger against the terminals and the company that now used them.
“They affected my stomach quite a bit,” Joan said. “Most days I worked,
I would throw up in the ladies room. I didn’t throw up before I started
working on the computer, and I haven’t thrown up since I quit.
“The screens weren’t at all soft on the eyes, even with the glare
screens that snapped over the top. And they were nontiltable.”
She also complained that the screens were too low even for a five footer
like her.
“Could I have some books and put my system on top of them so the screen
will be in the middle of my eyes?” she recalls asking a supervisor. “You
get this constant tension in your back because you’re always hunched
over.”
“No,” she says the supervisor told her in effect, “that’s unacceptable,
totally.”
Why?
“Because,” came the reply, allegedly, “the office won’t look the same.
It won’t be level.”
Joan says management wouldn’t even let her work with the terminal in the
middle of her desk. “They wanted them all on the same side,” she
recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, I don’t work on that side of the desk, sport.’
It was ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. Even a simple request like that
was too much.”
At least the chair was adjustable “I lowered it so I could get my eyes
as close to the middle of the screen as possible,” she says. “I was so
low that if I opened the middle drawer on my desk I’d bang myself.”
But it was the lights that most irked Joan. They were bright
fluorescents, fine for traditional paperwork but not for the computer
era. Management, pressed by employees, took out many of the tubes; and
yet Joan says some glare-ridden workers still wore sunglasses.
She also complains that the company wouldn’t even offer the operators
eye examinations, an irony, considering that she was processing health
claims.
Again, Joan was a union activist—as a result of her experiences—and some
managers may recoil from the very notion of clerks organizing, and yet
in her litany of complaints about working conditions, there was not one
with which most ergonomics professionals would quarrel. Had management
listened to her on those issues, in fact, it would have been doing
itself a favor. Forcing the workers to strain their necks, backs, and
eyes is hardly the road to higher productivity and profit. It would have
cost several thousand dollars at the very most to change the lighting.
Corporate bureaucracy may or may not have allowed the workers to be
consulted in selection of the terminals, but there is no reason—other
than a misdirected passion for discipline and order—why the company
couldn’t have let Joan change the level of her screen.
Joan’s experiences are a good argument for the Canary-in-the-Mine Theory
of Labor Relations. In the days before electronic gas detectors, coal
miners carried canaries into the pits. The birds’ lungs were more
sensitive than theirs to poisonous fumes. And watching the canaries,
many a miner saved himself and others.
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., used the canary-in-the-mine parallel to
describe artists and writers serving as an early-warning system to call
attention to social ills. And workers like Joan, “troublemakers,” are
your canaries. You may not agree with them, and you may aggressively
fight them, but before making up your mind, at least listen to them.
They can anticipate the concerns of less vocal workers scared of losing
their jobs.
“Well,” you ask,“what about my authority as a manager? You knuckle under
to the troublemakers once, they’ll come at you again and again.”
Confident executives, however, will avoid this misplaced machismo. They
will assert their authority more productively, letting workers have a
voice in working conditions but, in return, demanding good, steady
production, which, after all, is the bottom line. When your stockholders
receive dividends, how many will think, What slobs—their VDTs don’t even
line up at the same level!
Ideally, of course, your people won’t have to prop up their machines at
all, because they’ll have helped you choose easily adjustable screens
and other equipment.
“When I help design new computer systems,” says Robert Waters, an
ergonomics specialist with a background in psychology, “I try to find
out who’ll be using them. Then, if possible, I’ll seek out their
opinions.
“If you do that, people won’t feel so threatened. It will be their
equipment, too, not just the company’s. They won’t think, I don’t like
it, it’s bad for me.”
Richard Koffler, editor-publisher of the _Ergonomics Newsletter_, also
recommends giving the worker a voice in equipment selection: “If you can
do it, try it. They’ll tell themselves, ‘I wouldn’t want to look like a
fool because I chose something that wasn’t good.’”
In Washington, D.C., Richard G. Barry, now senior advisor for management
systems at the World Bank, has successfully let employees help pick some
of the computer gear the bank was using. Barry didn’t set out to
experiment. He just decided that giving the workers a strong voice would
be the most logical way.
It happened, among other places, in the offices of the Eastern African
region at the bank’s D.C. headquarters. “We had a few word-processing
machines,” Barry said, “and there were a few word-processing centers
around the bank where we could go if we wanted something done, but
essentially we were starting out from zero.”
The office included two hundred professionals and one hundred
secretaries and other clerical workers, and Barry’s task force
represented them in several ways. One was by job function; lending
officers were there as well as those overseeing the existing projects.
People also came from different parts of the office’s bureaucracy, from
different countries, and, obviously, from different job levels—everyone
from secretaries to division chiefs. Barry didn’t go out of his way to
pamper clerical workers in particular. He simply felt that like any
other bank employees, they should decide what tools they needed to get
the job done.
Secretaries, far from being anticomputer, asked for equipment to reduce
repetitive typing. Managers sought fast word processing, in different
languages, which complicated keyboard requirements. The secretaries
themselves wanted terminals with whose keyboards and screens they’d be
happy. In a microcomputer installation without separate terminals, of
course, there may be less choice.
It took a year for the task force to line up the equipment, and wisely
the actual equipment shopping came last. Instead, the task force focused
on what characteristics it wanted the gear to have. Then it learned what
was available—how products compared to the ideal system within budget.
As a result, the Eastern African region ended up with good, sharp
computer screens, ergonomic furniture from the very start, and a
lighting system fit for computer work. And Barry says the teamwork
helped promote ...
... Good Job Design
A friend of mine, a mid-level manager, was almost salivating over the
economies of computerized word processing.
“You know what I’d do?” he said of an office where he’d worked. “I’d
take out just about all the secretaries and dump them into a central
office. I’d reduce their salaries. They’d be doing less demanding work
and should be paid less.” He wasn’t an ogre. He was reflecting the
thinking of a good many modern managers. It makes sense, doesn’t it,
turning offices into factories, which, indeed, might run twenty-four
hours a day, to make the best use of equipment?
Well, not quite. In fact, not at all. Nor should you try obnoxious
gimmicks like =computerized pacing=.
They’re all threats to good =job design=, which is nothing more than
sensibly deciding what each job includes and how the employee does it.
Consider typing pools—er, centralized word-processing operations. If not
passé, they at least deserve to be; most, anyway. Employees’ salaries
keep rising, even with slowed-down inflation, while the price of
computers is falling. By the end of this decade an average worker’s
salary may exceed $20,000 annually. And yet micros and dedicated word
processors will easily cost less than several thousand dollars. Even
now, for a typical business, Barry says, centralized word processing
simply doesn’t pay; it tears the employee away from his or her boss and
harms the managers’ own work. Executives must vie with other offices of
a company for the word processors’ time. They can’t effortlessly set
their own priorities. And quality is more of a problem, too, because, as
Barry notes, “someone in centralized word processing won’t normally get
hell for not catching an error. I expect my secretary to challenge
anything she’s not certain about. For instance, my secretary will come
in and say, ‘You left such-and-such person off the list of people
receiving the memo.’ Which matters. Often who a memo goes to matters as
much as what’s in the memo.”
And what about the question of knowing which calls to put through to the
boss? Around the time Barry and I talked, he was obsessed with a paper
projecting the World Bank’s office needs for the next twenty-five years.
He didn’t have to tell his secretary of the importance of any call about
the paper. She knew. For she’d been helping him put it together.
“It isn’t a question anymore of the efficient use of the machines,”
Barry says in recommending the traditional secretary over the pool
arrangement. “It’s effective use of the people. It’s like the phone.
Even if people use the phone just twice a day for business, we still
give them their own. We don’t put all the phones in one room, do we?”
You may disagree with Barry and still insist that central word
processing is the most efficient use of both equipment and people; and
maybe your company’s size, economics, or policy will allow nothing else.
But if so, be prepared for more job complaints. Shut off from the
outside world, perhaps in a windowless, poorly ventilated room, the pool
members may feel like Dickensian factory hands. And the claustrophobia
may not just be physical. With no one around but others in drudge jobs
and their immediate supervisors, the workers feel cut off from chances
for advancement. They become obsessed with their immediate surroundings
and may be more apt to notice shortcomings of their equipment. “You look
at studies of typing pools,” says Waters, “and you’ll find they may
actually get in the way of productivity. More workers hate their jobs,
and they’re more likely to dislike their equipment, feel backaches,
other pains.” He says that sick leave, deservedly or not, may increase.
A gray-haired word processor in Manhattan said she disliked even
“clusters,” which were smaller and presumably more pleasant than a giant
typing pool in a back room. She missed the “pretty cozy relationship”
she enjoyed as secretary to one executive.[35]
Footnote 35:
The material on the Manhattan word processor comes from Barbara
Garson’s article in _Mother Jones magazine_, July 1981, p. 32.
“He might send me uptown to return a blouse that didn’t fit his wife. So
he couldn’t very well tell me not to make personal calls. Not that I
stayed on the phone all day. My job was to get his work out, which
included staying late if I had to. He appreciated me. And I expected to
stay with him till he retired.”
Responding to consultants’ recommendations, however, her company one day
offered her three choices. She could work as a mere administrative
assistant, join a word-processing operation, or quit. So she forsook the
familiar typewriter for a Wang. “Ah,” she reflected, “when I think of
those years of correction tape, white-out, retyping!”
Then, continuing her remarks to writer Barbara Garson, she added: “I
want you to take this down: I love my Wang. It’s not the machine that
gave me the shaft.”
What, then, did?
“Straight typing, seven hours a day,” said the word processor. “That’s
the shaft.”
Like Barry, she criticized the quality of work from word-processing
pools—or the lack of it.
“The worst thing,” she said, “is when things come by me with wrong
spelling, wrong information. Sometimes I think I should correct it. I
did at first. But that’s not how they judge me.” It’s by the number of
keystrokes. “So why should I take time to correct their work? And why
should I stay two minutes past lunch if they’re timing me that way?”
Michael Smith, however, makes a good case for careful, sensitive
monitoring.
“Management would be foolish,” he said, “if they didn’t monitor
performance. It’s what you do with the monitoring that counts. If you
use it in a negative way, that hurts performance. It might improve it
for a minute or a half hour while you were watching them, but it might
hurt in the long run.” He recommends, instead, systems that give the
workers themselves “direct, immediate feedback. The faster the better.”
Joan’s old insurance company, shortly after she left in 1982, started a
monitoring system in offices across the country. Some of her
ex-colleagues found it more palatable than a simple keystroke count.
Every six months it adjusted their job levels and salaries. And
production—the number of health claims processed—was just 30 percent in
the formula. Accuracy was another 30. The remainder of the formula
plugged in attendance and supervisors’ observations on job knowledge and
the quality of correspondence. The employees weren’t just at the mercy
of a machine.
“It’s a more equitable system,” said a claims processor whose salary
leaped from $220 to more than $280 a week.
Still, the union claimed that most members weren’t so well disposed to
the new system. That may or may not have been true. Just the same, the
claims processor qualified her own enthusiasm. She wanted faster
feedback from the monitoring. “It would be constructive,” she said, “if
we got it at the end of the day or even weekly.”
The woman, too, hoped to know the exact math behind the salary system:
“I’ve asked my manager a number of times. She said, ‘You wouldn’t
understand it.’ I said, ‘Tell it to me, and I will understand it.‘”
Big questions persisted. Was the insurance company, for instance, really
crediting her extra for writing letters to doctors who haven’t submitted
diagnoses with claims? The company told her that it was—that it still
paid to handle such cases. But she wasn’t so sure. Management, she
claimed, had lied on other matters.
Another worker said the company did not audit enough forms to discourage
slipshod work from high producers.
Even in its first few weeks, with the normal start-up wrinkles, the
system did show some promise. Production was dramatically up. “If I was
a manager and my job was to get the maximum amount of work out of an
employee,” said a claims processor, a union member, “yeah—in that
position I’d use it.” But she worried, justifiably, about her own
future. “Maybe a person has been producing ninety claims a day. How much
more can they push them? They can’t push them past a hundred, so what
else is there for them to do?
“There aren’t many [promotion] opportunities here because supervisors
have been here for years and years,” she said. And she wondered: What
about turnover?
It was winter 1982. A depression or near depression was in full swing.
Would the system have worked well in normal times?
Moreover, how much of a trade-off existed between the claims processors’
productivity and health? NIOSH studied 130 occupations in the 1970s and
found that clerical workers were second highest in illnesses like
coronary heart disease. Also, many of the women in Joan’s former
insurance office had children and blue-collar husbands, and a
Massachusetts study showed that women in such families suffered nearly
double the heart-disease rate of their husbands. And in Joan’s office,
did health insurance claims—for her coworkers’ own ills—cancel out some
of the productivity increases? Moreover, how about the moral issue?
Suppose the monitoring system taxes the employees’ health for short-term
gains; isn’t it almost the same as if the company were belching
carcinogens into the air?
If you’re working in a low-level clerical job without control over your
fate, you’re a good heart-attack candidate, according to R. A. Karasek,
a professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations
Research at Columbia University.[36] He cites studies showing that
people in “strain occupations” may show twice as much “definite and
suspected myocardial infarction and angina pectoris.”
Footnote 36:
See “Job Decision Latitude, Job Design, and Coronary Heart Disease,”
by R. A. Karasek, who participated in a 1981 Purdue University
conference on job stress. The Karasek findings appeared on pages 48-55
of _Machine Pacing and Occupation Stress_, a book published in 1981 by
Taylor & Francis Limited, London. In Karasek’s words, “Job-design
strategies advocating limited skill usage and decision authority for
the majority of the workforce appear to be associated with a host of
undesirable, unintended consequences ranging from skill
under-utilization (and consequent productivity loss) to increased risk
of coronary heart disease.”
Computerized pacing can increase the stress and health risks. Smith says
it’s rarely if ever the answer in white-collar work, not even mail
sorting—nothing “involving letters, letters, and so on. It doesn’t
improve efficiency because there are a lot of errors.” Pacing isn’t just
monitoring, after all. The work is electronically moving past the worker
as if it’s on a factory conveyer belt. Think of all the lemons Detroit
put on the road in its eagerness for new production records. “With older
workers the error rate isn’t as high,” Smith says of white-collar jobs
paced by machines. “Maybe it has to do with the nervousness of young
people. Older workers always report more job satisfaction. They become
used to the drudgery. It’s a hell of a way to put it, but that’s what
happens.” Not that many older workers love machine pacing, either.
So, in a large, factorylike office, what’s a happy compromise between
lax discipline and mechanized martinets?
You might try =participatory monitoring=.
Hear employees’ suggestions for a fair monitoring system. You needn’t
agree. Just listen. Your people may know of complications you wouldn’t
consider in arriving at your production goals; and you may also get a
better inkling of how long it will take for people and machines to
adjust to each other.
Also, setting goals, keep remembering that tasks vary. Don’t let your
monitoring system penalize people, for instance, who fill out forms more
complicated than other workers‘.
Keep your commitment to quality. Be willing to give employees some time
away from arduous work at the tube. It’s a good way to reduce expensive
errors. And tube breaks might not cost you that much in the end. Can
you, for instance, design your people’s jobs to use them fully while
limiting their time in front of the screens? Maybe you can’t. Perhaps,
with thorough computerization, there aren’t many off-line jobs left. But
try. Maybe, for instance, some data-entry clerks, showing high
motivation, can work part time in low-level telephone sales. The clerks
won’t feel so trapped; and you may discover some top-flight talent.
Ask your employees for their ideas. Who says every tube break absolutely
has to be a _work_ break?
Plan, however, for breaks of one kind or another. NIOSH favors breaks
“of at least fifteen minutes every two hours” for moderately heavy
terminal work and the same breaks every hour for workers in the most
demanding, repetitive tasks. A British labor group even suggests
structuring the workday so that people spend no more than half of it at
the terminal. You might chafe under those restrictions—many American
companies would—but don’t scoff at your own people’s ideas on breaks as
long as they do the work.
Here again, think about the Canary-in-the-Mine Theory of Labor
Relations; do not tune out the complainers: do not misplace machismo.
Terminal Happiness
In the Dark Ages, the pre-VDT days of newspapering, I worked on a
rickety manual typewriter. How I envied Darlene at the desk behind me! I
was a reporter-feature writer, while she was stuck with grinding out TV
listings and obits; but Irving Leibowitz, the editor, had favored her
with a Selectric, and I demanded to know why.
“Well,” Leibo said, “she’s a neater typist.” It mattered. Darlene would
feed her Selectric copy to an =optical character reader=, which helped
convert the typing to newspaper print. “There’s another reason, too,” he
said.
“What?”
“Darlene has a lousier job than you do,” said Leibo, himself a manual
typewriter user, “and just as much typing to do. In fact, more.”
Budgeting for VDTs, you might keep Leibo’s wisdom in mind. He gave out
the best equipment not to his higher-ranking people but to those who
needed it the most.
I thought of Leibo and Darlene when I read of the Grid Compass executive
computer and its original $10,000 price. It might be a splendid machine,
but what a waste of money in many cases. The money instead might go to
buy the right screens and keyboards for subordinates. So often the
difference is just a few hundred dollars, if it exists at all. Don’t
give your employees a say in the selection of equipment and then
restrict their choices through unreasonable penny-pinching. If you can’t
do it the right way immediately, maybe you should wait before you
computerize.
Mind you, no terminal or micro is going to be ergonomically perfect.
“I’d flunk them all,” said Waters, and he started with the DEC VT100
terminal he was using on his job at the time. The display was plain, old
white on black, not the best ergonomically, and it was too dim for many
offices. Fortunately, the lighting in his room was subdued. The
terminal, however, had other shortcomings—for instance, the lack of
simple knobs to adjust the screen’s brightness and contrast. Waters
instead had to control them with a series of keystrokes that he was
always forgetting. His loudest groans, though, were over the numbers pad
to the right of the keyboard. “I count 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9,” Waters said.
“I don’t want anything where I count 7-8-9-4-5-6-1-2-3.” That’s how his
numbers pad was; that’s how my machine’s is; that’s in fact how most
computer pads are.
“Well,” I asked, “isn’t that just like a calculator’s?”
“But,” said Waters, “isn’t it a little confusing to switch back and
forth between that arrangement and the numbers of a telephone? Which are
in the normal numerical order.”[37]
Footnote 37:
Before Bell adopted the standard touch-phone numbers pad, it did a
study showing the superiority of the 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 arrangement.
The study had strong financial motivations. After all, the more wrong
numbers people dialed, the greater would be the cost to the phone
company, since Bell at the time probably wasn’t charging anyone for
wrong numbers.
You may disagree with Waters, but his message comes through. Even
ergonomics experts can’t always end up in front of the terminal of their
dreams. What you and your people want, however, is a sensible
compromise.
Ideally, rather than simply seeking the biggest discount through the
most massive purchase, you’ll remember that different people need
different terminals. You may in fact save money that way.
An executive who hates to type, for instance, and who doesn’t have to,
won’t need the same keyboard as a data-entry clerk. It still should be a
good board in case he changes his mind, but it needn’t be the most
expensive. With a World Bank-style selection committee, you’ll be more
sensitive to the needs of different offices, different levels of
employee.
Encourage some committee members to spend at least two or three hours
with the equipment you’re planning to buy; they may change their minds
later—but that’s better than no tryout at all.
Testing my Kaypro at dealers, I wrote test letters, composed sample
articles, and tried as closely as I could to duplicate my routine.