Managing Organizational Change (RLE: Organizations)

Human Factors and Automation

Fred Fallik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135937218
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The United States Internal Revenue Service introduced a multi-million dollar program to automate its operations in the early 1980s. This book describes a multidisciplinary study of the experiences of several thousand users in this program, based primarily on questionnaires, observation and interviews. The case study gives valuable guidance to managers and their consultants involved in planning introduction of new office technology, as well as providing more academic insights into aspects of human behaviour under changing working conditions.

Appendix 1

Recommendations by the Human Resources Technology Staff

Introduction

Reacting to a concern that human factors were not being given appropriate attention as the Internal Revenue Service moves into automation, a working group was established to make recommendations on steps to be taken to address this issue.

The group has identified and will be focusing on five basic approaches to include human factors considerations in an automated environment. These five approaches will be introduced and developed during the Automated Collection System (ACS) pilots in four districts. Because of the advanced status of the ACS pilots and because of the vendor competition, such activities will be limited. Techniques developed during the pilots will be refined for use in other Service automation efforts.

The five approaches discussed in this paper are as follows:

Institute an Employee/Manager feedback system

Increase Employee/Manager interpersonal contact

Introduce new Orientation and Training modules relevant to preparing for technological change

Design innovative working arrangements to humanize work

Seek Labor/Management cooperation through early union involvement

The attached outline encompasses a series of proposed actions to incorporate human resources factors into automated systems planning and implementation. The recommendations were designed to be independent of each other. That is, the potential exists to delete one or more recommendations without seriously affecting the implementation of other recommendations. The one exception would be that actions which require the acquisition of new knowledge and skills would require training.

The outline itself is comprised primarily of two broad topic areas: The first area describes Phase I recommendations primarily concerned with the ACS pilots. Phase II recommendations will be initiated during Phase I and describe long term experiments extending beyond ACS. Phase I and Phase II of the outline focus on specific areas of concern to human resources and present recommendations to address these issues. In addition, Sections III and IV list some anticipated results of our proposals and outline Labor/Management Relations Implications.

Human Resources Technology Staff recommendations

I. Initial scope of actions to be implemented beginning now and continuing through ACS pilot

Given Assumptions:

No additional National Office personnel evaluation teams at pilot sites as a result of this proposal.

No significant work interruptions during duty hours.

Employee/manager feedback system

Employee feedback systems are designed to accomplish four broad objectives:

Provide a mechanism for identifying problems arising out of the use or anticipated use of automated equipment and potential resolutions to these problems.

Provide ‘base line’ data for assessing and evaluating the impact of automated equipment on organizational functions within a wide range of variables.

Provide an opportunity for users to suggest new applications and approaches for enhanced organizational effectiveness, e.g., tasks, procedures, group processes, structure.

To detect further training needs, refinements, etc.

The following systems would utilize a micro-computer to input, FTS lines for transmission (estimated to be up to one hour per day), and a receiving micro-computer in the National Office during the ACS pilot period. Once the vendor is selected, use of ACS equipment should be explored.

The National Office will purchase or contract for the purchasing of the computers for the ACS districts in addition to the one to be located in the Human Resources Technology Group in Washington. National Office Collection and the National Office ACS Project Team will each have a micro-computer linked to this system. Collection and ACS will be utilizing the system to transmit data related to their respective evaluation processes.

1. ELECTRONIC EMPLOYEE/MANAGER FEEDBACK

Employees and managers would be asked to record problems or suggestions for improvements on a specially designed card. These cards would then be collected and fed to the National Office work group via a computer link. The group would use these employee reactions to identify: (1) changes in employee attitudes toward work, the environment, supervision, the social atmosphere, etc.; (2) procedural, mechanical or systemic equipment problems; and (3) additional training needs.

In addition to the identification of immediate and potential problems and opportunities for improvement, results could be used in the design of long-range planning for future automation projects.

This concept could also allow for employee feeling of involvement in the test process outside of equipment testing. It may well also offset to some extent some of the negative aspects of a production oriented system.

In order to protect the vendor evaluation process, it may be necessary to pool information from all call sites in order to erase site identification. If this concern could be overcome, there is some advantage to evaluating data with site identification in the interest of overall test validation.

Such a system might also be used by the ACS System Acceptability Test (SAT)/Evaluation Team as a direct information feed to the National Office Automated Collection System organization.

It is also recommended that a system be explored to utilize the vendor's computers to provide periodic feedback to employees on the results of their contacts (such as dollar amounts of payments made).

2. EMPLOYEE QUESTIONNAIRE

An employee questionnaire would be designed to gather data on changing employee attitudes toward all aspects of their work—environment, comfort, supervision received, space, social atmosphere, etc. The questionnaire would be administered on the first day of training, at least once during the pilot, and following the pilot.

The content areas of the questionnaire would include the following:

Organizational communication patterns

Organizational leadership styles

Job satisfaction

Group processes

Feedback systems

Career orientation

Sociodemographic factors

Organizational climate

Ergonomic concerns

The questionnaire is designed to be self-administered in about 15 to 20 minutes. Responses will be both closed and open-ended. The results of this questionnaire will be computer and content analyzed for patterns of responses.

3. EXIT INTERVIEWS

During the course of the pilot project some attrition of employees is expected. While people leave a job for a variety of reasons, those reasons which arise from pilot working conditions need to be documented and evaluated.

To supplement the prescribed exit interview process, we propose to develop an interview guide. This interview guide will be focused on issues pertinent to the pilot program. More specifically, we will attempt to have the interviewer gather narrative information on ergonomic, social and administrative factors which contributed to the decision of the employee or manager to withdraw from the ACS pilot program.

Such information will be collected as an adjunct to the normal exit procedures. An interview guide will be developed by the Human Resources Technology group and distributed to appropriate staff at each test site for administration as attrition occurs. Completed forms will be forwarded to the National Office Staff following each interview.

Employee/manager interpersonal contact

Decreased personal contact due to the new automated system dictates a need for structuring alternatives for increased interpersonal dealings. Studies of computer-mediated work and offices with information technology systems indicate that people can feel isolated in an impersonal situation. They may also feel they have lost the support and assistance they previously received from communication with peers and supervisors. These feelings can hamper the productivity goals of the organization if they result in reduced job satisfaction, job commitment and appropriate risk taking.

We recommend that the following actions be considered by local managers:

1.Managers review their current practices for managerial staff meetings and employee-supervisor individual and group meetings, then determine any obvious improvements in local communication and problem-solving they feel are necessary under the existing work environment. Given the increased data available under the ACS system, they can project any improvements they wish to implement under the new system.

2.Recognizing that a 43 % overhead figure has been built into ACS staffing we recommend that managerial, employee and employee/manager team meetings should be held during duty hours. Meetings could be held periodically or weekly as needed. Length...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Disclaimer
• Acknowledgements
• Section I. Background
• Section II. Automation Implementation
• Section III. Lessons Learned
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• References
• Additional Resources
• Index