"!#~#! I hate this job!" Redesigning the job could help strike this all-too-common phrase from the employee's vocabulary - valuable personnel management techniques learned from innovations implemented by Pizza Hut, General Electric and other corporations - includes bibliography

Business Horizons, Jan-Feb, 1994 by D. Keith Denton

How often has that thought burst from your mind, if not your mouth? If you are lucky enough to say "Never," you are probably in the minority. When people talk about what is wrong with employees today, or about the disappearance of the American work ethic, they may be missing the point. For most people work is an important part of their lives--or at least it could be.

What people hate is often not the job but just some aspects of it. If you think about your own job for a minute, chances are you do not dislike everything about it--just the "irritating" parts. Rather than ignoring or simply putting up with them, you should closely examine these aspects. When the maddening parts of a job are examined closely, great things can happen. Only then can you expect significant long-term improvement in productivity, quality, and job satisfaction. Attention to detail, which can go a long way, begins by questioning the way things are done.

Consider what Maids International has done. A highly successful house-cleaning service franchise, Maids International hires mostly women or part-timers with young children and pays them between $4.25 and $7.50 an hour. This wage rate is significant because it means the company draws from the same labor pool as fast-food and other entry-level businesses. To stay successful, management believed it could not afford the high turnover normally associated with these types of business. So, says CEO Dan Bishop, "We focused the whole concept of the company on the labor. Fatigue and boredom are what burns people out. We tried to eliminate them" (Stewart 1990).

What Bishop did was what any manager should do: he went out and studied his employees to see how they worked, minute by minute. After examining every task they performed, he discovered that a lot of unnecessary work was going on. Changes were made. Now his maids wind a vacuum cord in three seconds rather than the eight seconds it used to take. They bend over 30 times rather than the 72 times it used to take to clean the average house. By working in foursomes, they are better able to rotate jobs. Now when one maid cleans a kitchen in one house, he or she will do a bedroom in another.

Has all this concentration on how the job is done paid off?. If turnover is the measure of success, then the answer is yes. Maids International's employees stay with the job about nine months, compared to five months at such places as fast-food businesses.

Ask 'em

Upper management does not have to redesign a job itself. Pizza Hut found it could improve working conditions by asking employees to suggest ways to redesign their work. Store managers helped their corporate headquarters decide what paperwork they could eliminate. The company created a more semi-autonomous structure with fewer layers of management and less corporate paperwork. Many believe this strategy--known as work elimination--was responsible for the 40 percent sales growth of the stores.

Work elimination, rather than job elimination, holds the greatest promise for job enhancement. The aim is to eliminate wasteful and unnecessary tasks. That is especially important when fewer people are working in leaner organizations.

Pizza Hut is not the only organization that has been focusing on work elimination. When CEO Alex Mandl tried it at Sea-Land, job descriptions shrunk from five pages to one. This was done by challenging assumptions about the who, what, where, when, and why of work. For example, salespeople no longer need to write overly detailed reports, which often went unread anyway. The rule for restructuring is simple: If somebody else's department needs it more than you, let that group do it! As a result of this attitude, the company often found that other departments did not need it either.

As powerful as this management attitude is, work elimination can be even more powerful when everybody becomes involved in choosing what task to eliminate. That situation is occurring at General Electric.

"Work-Out" G.E. Style

One of the most widely publicized examples of restructuring or work elimination process is G.E. 's Work-Out Program. For a number of years the giant corporation has been pursuing a systematic attempt to eliminate, simplify, or at least reduce the drudgery and inefficiency of work by using employee involvement. In 1988, G.E.'s chairman, Jack Welch, and its director of corporate management development, James Baughman, both came up with the concept. The idea was to trim G.E.'s considerable bureaucracy by having employees fundamentally question the way the company and they themselves go about their daily business.

Through a series of "town meetings" held with departments throughout the company, G.E.'s Work-Out sessions are used to examine and challenge all kinds of company practices. Those who participate in these sessions are promised there will be no retribution. They are also promised immediate feedback and action by management. The sessions, which usually last three days, cover everything from the number of management approvals needed to how budgets are proposed.