ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS AFFECTING WORK

The nature of work changes as organizations change in response to new demands and environmental pressures. Business-process engineering, downsizing and delayering all have significant effects on the type of work carried out, on feelings of security and on the career opportunities available in organizations. Three of the most important factors – the ‘lean’ organization, the changing role of the process worker and the flexible firm – are discussed below.

The lean organization 

The term ‘lean production’ was popularized by Womack and Jones (1970) in The Machine That Changed the World. But the drive for leaner methods of working was confined initially to the car industry. In the classic case of Toyota, one of the pioneers of lean production, or more loosely, ‘world class manufacturing’, seven forms of waste were identified, which had to be eliminated. These were overproduction, waiting, transporting, over-processing, inventories, moving, and making defective parts or products. Lean production aims to add value by minimizing waste in terms of materials, time, space and people. Production systems associated with leanness include just-in-time, supply chain management, material resources planning and zero defects/right first time. Business process re-engineering programmes often accompany drives for leaner methods of working and total quality management approaches are used to support drives for greater levels of customer satisfaction and service.

The concept of ‘leanness’ has since been extended to non-manufacturing organizations. This can often be number driven and is implemented by means of a reduction in headcounts (downsizing) and a reduction in the number of levels of management and supervision (delayering). But there is no standard model of what a lean organization looks like. According to the report on the research conducted by the Institute of Personnel and Development (IPD) on lean and responsive organizations (IPD, 1998b), firms select from a menu the methods that meet their particular business needs. These include, other than delayering or the negative approach of downsizing, positive steps such as:

● team-based work organizations; 

● shop-floor empowerment and problem-solving practices; 

● quality built in, not inspected in; 

● emphasis on horizontal business processes rather than vertical structures; 

● partnership relationships with suppliers; 

● cross-functional management and development teams; 

● responsiveness to customer demand; 

● human resource management policies aimed at high motivation and commitment and including communication programmes and participation in decisionmaking.

The IPD report emphasizes that qualitative change through people is a major feature of lean working but that the issue is not just that of launching change. The key requirement is to sustain it. The report also noted that HR practitioners can play a number of important roles in the process of managing change. These include that of supporter, interpreter, champion, monitor, resourcer, and anticipator of potential problems. 

Aquestion posed by Purcell et al (1998) was: ‘Are lean organizations usually mean organizations?’ But they commented that the IPD research did not indicate that leaner methods of work have positive implications for employees. The evidence suggested that the impact on people is often negative, particularly when restructuring means downsizing and re-engineering. Employees work longer hours, stress rises, career opportunities are reduced and morale and motivation fall. They also made the point that it is clear that many initiatives fail because they do not take into account the people implications, and that the first and most significant barrier was middle management resistance.