Engineers and Psychologists: A Battle for Designing Jobs

Loading...

En provenance du cours de University of Pennsylvania

Management Fundamentals

58 notes

University of Pennsylvania

Management Fundamentals

58 notes

Cours 3 sur 4 dans Specialization The Business of Health Care

People are the most valuable asset of any business, but they are also the most unpredictable, and the most difficult asset to manage. And although managing people well is critical to the health of any organization, most managers don't get the training they need to make good management decisions. Now, award-winning authors and renowned management Professors Mike Useem and Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School have designed this course to introduce you to the key elements of managing people. Based on their popular course at Wharton, this course will teach you how to motivate individual performance and design reward systems, how to design jobs and organize work for high performance, how to make good and timely management decisions, and how to design and change your organization’s architecture. By the end of this course, you'll have developed the skills you need to start motivating, organizing, and rewarding people in your organization so that you can thrive as a business and as a social organization.

À partir de la leçon

Task, Jobs, and Systems of Work

This module is designed to teach you the difference between a task and a job. You'll learn how jobs are historically designed, and you'll explore some of the drawbacks related to past work systems. You'll also learn how job design has been influenced by engineering and psychology. Finally, you'll look at real-world examples from the GM and Toyota to compare their respective approaches. By the end of this module, you'll understand how jobs and systems of work have evolved to improve employee performance and productivity.

Tasks vs. Jobs3:17

How to Design Jobs11:44

Drawbacks and Rethinking Job Design12:09

Engineers and Psychologists: A Battle for Designing Jobs7:35

Lessons from the Japanese and Auto Industries14:12

Systems of Work6:22

Rencontrer les enseignants

Michael Useem
Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management
The Wharton School
Peter Cappelli
Professor of Management, Director, Center for Human Resources
The Wharton School

So let's talk a little bit about what job design might look like with an example

that we see a lot at the Wharton School, and that's the job of junior analysts.

These are people who leave college and go to work for investment banks.

What do those jobs look like?

At least in a lot of places, the students find them pretty miserable and

the common theme about them is job design.

So what they find that they are doing is spread sheet analysis.

They get their data and they are told to manipulate it in Excel and

do some various kinds of calculations with it.

And that might not be bad, except that they do that everyday, all day.

Usually the same kind of analysis.

Once they figure out how to do it, they just do it over and over and

over and over.

There is no variety in that.

And there's no real control over how they do it either or when they do it.

It's dropped on their desk, we need this by tomorrow morning, and

here's how you gotta do it.

Everything is exactly the same.

The most surprising thing is that they've got

no idea what they're actually working on, typically.

Nobody tells them, they just give them the data.

So this idea of the significance of what they're doing, they might be working

on something really big for a country or something, they never know.

And how well they do on these tasks, they often don't know that either.

They hear, maybe somebody comes in and yells at them if there's a problem,

but otherwise they never know whether they've done a good or a bad job.

And you think about the consequence of that, the fact that they hate their jobs,

means in order to get them to do these jobs and to stay there,

you got to pay them a ton of money which was the deal.

You got a really boring job you're not going to like very much.

And it's incredibly hard, lots of hours, and demanding, but

we pay you a ton of money, right?

Now, if you think about how you would fix that job, it's not that hard to do.

A simple way to fix it, the simplest thing to do is to just tell people what are you

working on, takes ten seconds to tell them.

This is a bond issue for the Kingdom of Jordan or

something like that, so you know what is.

And then when you're doing the final presentation, maybe you let them sit in

the back of the room so that they get a sense of why this matters.

They also get some feedback.

Does the client like this whole project or not, right?

And maybe if they gotta do spreadsheet analysis,

at least you could have them do different analyses over the course of a week, so

it's not the same one all the time.

And could you give them a little control over when they do it,

at least schedule and maybe to some extent how.

It's not that hard to fix this kind of work

in ways that would make people like it better.

And when they like it better, quality goes up and

people stay longer, and performance improves as well.

So I have a little video here I'd like to show you of something that went

viral in an airline.

So take a look at this.

>> Good evening, folks, welcome aboard Southwest Airlines, flight 372,

service to Oklahoma City.

Those of you that have flown us before know that we do things a little bit

differently on Southwest.

Some of us tell jokes.

Some of us sing.

Some of us just stand there and look beautiful.

I, unfortunately, can do none of those.

So here's the one thing that I do know how to do.

We're going to shake things up a little bit,

I need a little audience participation.

Otherwise, this is not going to go over well at all.

So here's what I need, especially you guys in the front,

because you know what's coming.

All right, I need a V, all right?

All I need you to do is stomp and clap and I'm going to do the rest,

because I just have had five flights today and

I just cannot do the regular boring announcement, again.

Otherwise, I'm going to put myself to sleep.

So you guys with me?

>> Yeah.

>> All right, so give me a stomp, clap, stomp, clap, come on.

Stomp, clap, stomp, clap.

Stay on beat there.

There you go, keep that going.

[MUSIC]

This is Flight 372 on SWA, the fight attendants on board serving you today,

Theresa in the middle, David in the back.

My name is David and I'm here to tell you that shortly after takeoff,

first things first, there's soft drinks and coffee to quench your thirst.

But if you want another kind of drink, then just holler,

alcoholic beverages will be $4.

If a Monster energy drink is your plan, that'll be $3 and you get the whole can.

We won't take your cash, you gotta pay with plastic, if you have a coupon,

that's fantastic.

We know you're ready to get to new places, open up the bins, put away your suitcases.

Carry-on items go under the seat in front of you, so

none of you have things by your feet.

If you have a seat on a row with an X, I'm going to go talk to you so

you might as well expect it.

You gotta help evacuate, in case we need you.

If you don't want to, then we'll going to re-seat you.

Before we leave, our advice is put away your electronic devices, fasten your

seatbelt, then put your trays up, press the button to make the seat back raise up.

Sit back relax, have a good time,

it is almost time to go so I'm done with the rhyme.

Thank you for the fact that I wasn't ignored, this is Southwest Airlines,

welcome aboard.

>> [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you very much for my beat.

I appreciate that, you will not get that on United Airlines, I guarantee you.

>> So in that video, you could see that the flight attendant was doing exactly

what flight attendants always have to do.

There's certain information they are required by the Federal

Aviation Administration to convey to you about the flight and about safety.

But they get to do it in a way that

taps maybe into their own creativity a little bit.

And they like it better and

it turns out the passengers liked it better as well, right?

So I think what we've had is a result of these lessons,

which began in the 1970s and progressed through the 1980s,

about how to design jobs differently is a kind of battle that went on between

engineers who design jobs and psychologists who design jobs.

And on the same campus at universities, you could go to an engineering department

and meet the industrial engineers, who were designing jobs as if Frederick Taylor

was more or less still around guiding them.

Time and motion studies, the one best way to do stuff,

fitting people to the machines and the logic of the production process.

And then you could cross the campus and

go talk to the psychologists, who would be explaining to you why that method of

designing jobs was a disaster and you had these two fighting.

And frankly, the engineers were winning

most of the time maybe because they were already in place.

But after we started to see things like the Lordstown, Ohio factory and

those problems spread across the US economy and

into Europe as well, it started to cost companies a lot of money.

Not just in turnover, but especially in quality and

having to make up and try to fix quality problems is really expensive.

But especially competition from foreign producers where they didn't

seem to be having these problems, really made US companies and

then European companies as well start to take all this much more seriously.

Explorer notre catalogue

Rejoignez-nous gratuitement et obtenez des recommendations, des mises à jour et des offres personnalisées.

Coursera propose un accès universel à la meilleure formation au monde, en partenariat avec des universités et des organisations du plus haut niveau, pour proposer des cours en ligne.

© 2019 Coursera Inc. Tous droits réservés.

Télécharger dans l'App Store

Disponible sur Google Play