Work Life Balance

My Ebook Publishing House

• Editorial: My Ebook Publishing House
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781310100505
• Categoría: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Categoría: Zeitmanagement

One of the great tragedies of our time is that we have the tools and technologies available to us to free up our time and open up our lives to learning, creating, relaxing, and building. And yet….we are so attached to being busy that we spend most of our time looking forward, looking backward, and missing those things that are right in front of us. - Work and play
- Robots or human beings?
- Reconciliation between the external complexity and the internal one.
- Ambivalence: social and personal

1. Work and play

The man spends almost a quarter, if not more, of the total of his life period working. Work is a human life circle, important not only in a quantitative manner, but also qualitative. What happens in the work sphere strongly influences life outside work. That is why it’s natural to ask ourselves how does work appear in the perspective of life quality? From this point of view, in the last years have accumulated, both in the science department, as well as in the practical organization of work a multitude of new elements that the reader will look at with interest, we are sure.

Taylorism. Through the 20s of our century, in the United States of America, a simple technician, Taylor, has paved a new way that seemed to revolutionize labor structure. The small-scale manufacturing operation, where the hammer was used, the pliers and chisel were replaced within no more than a century with the great enterprise base on a machinist technique. Taylor has stated the question of the scientific organization of labor. Thus, it appeared the classic scientific management, taylorism being one of the fundamental aspects. Taylorist philosophy can be resumed in three fundamental principles.

- The principle of simplified work. There are two fundamentally opposed strategies of work organization. The first strategy, specific to the small-scale manufacturing operation, is the complex work.

A worker, helped by his simple instruments, but putting a great amount of ingenuousness in, creates an activity complex finalized either in a complete product, either in an important subassembly of its. Opposed is the strategy of simplified labor. A complex work is divided into the simpler component operations and distributed to a large number of workers. A product is no longer the result of a worker’s or a few workers ability, but of the conjugated contribution of a large number of individuals, each of them realizing an operation or a limited group of operations. The assembly line is the exemplary embodiment of this principle. The ones that have visited a vehicle enterprise were able to see this fundamental principle of the current technology in its purest form. And in fact, the vehicle industry was always associated with the success of taylorism. Any assembly line is founded on conveyor of a certain type. This conveyor displaces the product that has to be assembled. On one hand and the other, tens and even hundreds of workers effectuate an operation each, or a limited group of assembly operations: one assembles the wheels, another one sets up the steering wheel, another one screws on the spark plugs… The car moves ahead, and the same worker also assembles the wheels to a second, a third car and so on. At the end of the line, the car is already assembled. A worker supplies it with gasoline. Another one goes behind the wheel, starts the engine and drives the car to the storage area.

Assembly lines can be encountered all over in the television, clothing, footwear manufacturing. But why is that? Taylor’s theory was that simplified labor has many advantages as opposed to the complex one. And firstly, it is much more productive. 10 workers will do together, based on work division, more products than 10 workers that would make a product from beginning to end each. The strategy of simplified labor, grafted in the technologic system has generated a standard form of production organization.

The workman, which after many years of craftsmanship was capable of producing a consumer good from the beginning to the end, is replaced by the narrowly specialized workers mass. In fact, the specialization is often so simple that it ceases to be a specialization, a few hours being sufficient for the habituation by her difficult aspects, has thus become a simultaneously poorly qualified, highly standardized, repetitive, and monotonous. In one word, even though it has stopped being difficult (rarely is it effectively realized with “the sweat of one’s brow” has become a completely lacking in interest, humanly unsatisfying activity. No one can be happy or even content with of the fact that hundreds of times daily, and this for months and years, assembles the wheels from the right side or puts on the spark plugs or screws on the bulbs. The increase in work productivity was paid in human satisfaction units. Many industrial sociologists motivate that expecting from the current technologic industry a progress of professional qualification is an illusion. The industrial system, as it was generated by the taylorist principle of the simplified labor, doesn’t require a high qualification, but a rudimentary one. Some longitudinally made studies on the industrial professions dynamic from the past 50 years have reached to the conclusion that there is no empiric palpability from which to result that these would have become more complex, more qualified. Another research, undertaken on the jobs offered by one of the most developed industrial complexes of the present –Detroit, in USA- reaches to the conclusion that about 90% of these don’t require a professional preparation more major than a few days.

- The “one best way” principle (the only way, the best way). Anything, as simple, can be accomplished by many methods, in various ways. And it is clear that different methods of accomplishing something are not as good, as equal from the point of view of their efficiency.

One of them must be the better way: “one best way”. The main problem that Taylor has stated is formulated on this simple observation: naturally, do people manage, in a reasonable amount of time or ever, to discover the best manner of accomplishing something? The answer is negative. Spontaneously, only by chance, the man can discover the best way of working. Normally, we would stop to a sufficiently good, comfortable method, but not to the most efficient one. This answer is sustained of the accumulation of the current decision theory. The American social psychologist Herbert Simon, a laureate of the Nobel Prize for economy, is the author of the famous limited rationality theory. A central theorem of this theory affirms exactly this. The natural behavior of the complex systems (individual, group, community) is characterized not by optimality, but by sub-optimality. It will be constituted at a satisfactory level, and not at an optimum one. Before some sufficiently complex difficulties, the individual or community tends to stop the first satisfying solution that he manages to formulate. If the worker, by its own forces, only succeeds to find satisfying methods, but not at all optimum, then here, in the finding of labor methods exists an importance source of productivity increase. A specialist is needed, armed with systematical knowledge. The specialist in scientific organization of work and production is capable of discovering for every type of activity, the best method, namely the least tiring and also efficient one, and to instruct the worker in her utilization. Thus, work becomes much more efficient. But also much more scheduled, standardized. The worker is an instructed robot: he learns what to do and how to do it.

- The principle of homo economicus. This principle appreciates that, by his nature, the man is a passive, “lazy” being. Its only motivation to work is extrinsic: earnings.

Man is a rational economical being: he is rationally pursuing profit, exactly calculating the economic benefits that he can attain by its activity. Only by economically stimulating him you can motivate him to achieve performances. Jokingly, someone defined this idea as the “stick and carrot principle”. In order to determine the man to work, the organizers of the enterprise would put in readiness two instruments: “the carrot” –economic incentives for high performances” and “the stick” -all sorts of penalizations for modest results.

The entire system of performance evaluation of the classic capitalist enterprise is based on such a philosophy of the man that Taylor only formulated in explicit terms. If the specialist formulates the best work method, the worker can be economically interested to practice it. I have insisted more on classic scientific management, because it offers the clear image of the fundamental principles of the contemporary industrial system. Human relationships. Through the 30s, in USA another work organization management was constituted. As many other discoveries, it was the result of hazard. In that period, in USA, taylorism became very popular.

Many experiments meant to identify the principles of the best work management principles were made. A team formed of specialist- psychologists, sociologists was solicited to develop a series of typically taylorist research at a large enterprise of electric instruments, in Hawthorn. For example, they would study the best organizational system of breaks: how is it more efficient, to work for 8 hours without having a break, having a bigger break in the middle of the work day or having shorter and frequent breaks? Another problem was the one of lighting the working area: what kinds of light, at what intensity, where should its source be placed (and so on), does it create optimum work conditions? The new orientation of human resources was constituted precisely in relation to the experiments linked to this latter matter. A group of workers was transferred into an experimental chamber where the illumination conditions could be manipulated.

The purpose was to find the best illuminating system, associated with the best work performances. Specialists would expect that some types of illuminations to be associated with more modest results, whilst others lead to higher performances. However, their conclusions didn’t comply with these expectations, being even surprising. No matter what the illumination system utilized was, the workers of the experimental group realized performances noticeably higher than their department colleagues, which practically had the same work and the same technologic conditions. The conclusion that became quite clear was that not the illumination system noticeably affects work performances, but another operating factor, unintentionally, a conclusion reached by the specialists. This factor, about whose nature they were not enlightened, underlies the spectacular increase of performances. After thorough analysis of the experimental situation, it was concluded that this factor is represented by the group atmosphere, by human relationships.

The American industry of that period couldn’t have been, in any way, suspected by humanism. Work relationships were difficult, tensed and characterized through the open manifestation of power, dominated by the often violent and arbitrary manifestation of authority. The human atmosphere of the experimental group of Hawthorn rendered a striking contrast with the one in the average departments. The workers were asked for their agreement in participating at the experiment. They were widely explained what its intentions were. The manners where “academic”, polite, relaxed, not brutal or tense. The specialists have reached to the conclusion that the human atmosphere of work represents an important motivator of performance. The man is not simply an economic being. He is a social being: with needs of positive personal contacts, of being taken into account, respected, trusted. The model of homo economicus was replaced with the model of the social man. No one denies the fact that the man is interested by the economic earning that secures his existence. But he is also a being with multiple social necessities, ...