Product Design Engineering (PDE) program is part of the discipline of Industrial Engineering (IE) in BINUS ASO School of Engineering (BASE). Are you interested in knowing how do you increase your performance of work, either as Professional or as Business Person, in your future career?

Source: ISE Magazine 2019 (Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) 2019)

Author: Adam Cywar

Adam Cywar is a consultant, lecturer and author and a longtime IISE member who has consulted with many organizations. Prior to his retirement, he held middle-management positions in software development and industrial engineering organizations at IBM, where he pioneered the establishment of Activity Based Management concepts and was the Founder of the IBM Worldwide ABM Competency Center. He was a contributor to the first edition of the John Wiley Handbook of Industrial Engineering and introduced Total Quality Management concepts within IBM plants in the late 1960s. Cywar holds a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This is the first of three articles that addresses the age-old question of what drives the performance levels manifest in completing work; look for the others in upcoming issues of ISE. All are excerpts from his book, Factors That Affect The Performance Of Work available at no cost at cywar.org.

Factors that affect the performance of work

Pioneers of Industrial Engineering blazed the trail toward better productivity

Industrial engineers and others have always had a basic need to understand what the forces and contributing factors are that determine how well a piece of work gets accomplished. The purpose here is to examine in some detail what those factors are and some hints for utilizing this information to maximize the performance of a task, job or any other structure that is deemed work. Most of this information is based on my experience as a mechanical engineer and industrial engineer covering the last 60 years. Because it is based on empirical experience, there is no claim to representing scientific basis for this information. Per the CBS Sunday Morning show of April 9, 2017, trends in automation outside the factory floor (driverless cars, drones, etc.) will slowly decrease the number of workers in many occupations.

However, the basic need to understand and deal with the factors that affect job performance will still be necessary unless the need for all managers is done away with. Underlying all of this are some new ideas on how to not only assess and measure performance but be better equipped to make the more important decision: getting the “right” person to perform the work. As important, if not more critical, is having that individual “happy” in that work. There is nothing more miserable than going to work every day to do something totally demoralizing. Since the beginning of time, there has always been work to do. Picking the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden is probably the earliest task you could imagine as being a job or piece of work that was performed with several influencing factors. A Google search reveals the following partial list for definitions of work:

• To exert oneself by doing mental or physical work for a purpose or out of necessity. “I will work hard to improve my grades.” “She worked hard for ...” • Be employed. “Is your husband working again?” “My wife never worked.” “Do you want to work after the age of 60?” “She never did any work because she inherited a lot of money.” “She works as a waitress to put herself through college.” • Have an effect or outcome, often the one desired or expected. “This method doesn’t work.” “The medicine works only if you take it with a lot of water.” • Function; perform as expected when applied. “The washing machine won’t work unless it is plugged in.” “Does this old car still run well?” “This old radio doesn’t work anymore.” • Exercise; give a workout to. “My personal trainer works me very hard.” “This puzzle will exercise your mind.” • Gratify and charm. “The political candidate worked the crowds.” • Cultivate; prepare for crops. “Work the soil.” “Cultivate the land.”
For purposes here the following is the definition of work: Any paid or unpaid set of activities or tasks performed to reach a goal, within profit or nonprofit environments. Activities may be primarily physical or mental. A set of activities performed by someone on an automobile assembly line is primarily physical, while the activity performed by the engineer designing those tasks is mostly mental. In addition to this distinction, other considerations come into play when trying to understand the variables that drive performance levels. An attempt will be made to sort out the factors in such a way that will give the reader some hints and ideas for helping to improve performance and avoid things that are disastrous. Few individuals relish the idea of having their job performance measured. It can be a demeaning and resentful experience, especially when the person doing the measuring always seems to have to come up with suggestions for improvement. I can never recall being measured and evaluated wherein I was told there is nothing I can do to improve my performance. Behaviorists have many theories and ideas that touch on this subject; however, there will be little or no further discussion here. Some of the experiences I cite, in fact, may fly in the face of some popular behavioral schools of thought. This empirically based approach allows me this freedom. One can trace the beginnings of scientific measurement of work to the efforts of early pioneers of the industrial engineering profession. Early on, IEs were known variously as time study analysts, methods men, et al. The following two experiments are classic in the annals of IE history.

Setting organization principles

The basic set of principles that an enterprise uses to manage the work to be accomplished has a major impact on the performance of workers. At the beginning of my 30 years at IBM, the principles laid down by Thomas J. Watson at the founding of the company were: Have respect for the individual. Thomas Watson Jr. said his father believed an organization owed a special responsibility to its people. This took several forms at IBM; the “open door” policy was pattern setting for many companies. It simply allowed any employee to escalate problems or issues to any level of management without fear of reprisal. Watson espoused the importance of “recognizing that the individual employee has their own problems, ambitions, abilities, frustrations, and goals.” Promotion from within was the rule with rare exception. Allow for “wild ducks.” Watson Sr. knew complacency was the enemy of the organization, and he worked to make sure the company had its share of wild ducks. Probably one of the most significant examples of this were the wild ducks in Boca Raton, led by Don Estridge, that created the IBM Personal Computer. Give the best company service of any company in the world. This was a principle that measured employee performance at all levels. Watson Sr. said that granting excellent customer service was the responsibility of IBM’s sales and service forces but that good service requires the cooperation of all parts of the business. When he was 18, he sold pianos and sewing machines in the countryside. Farmers, almost always short of cash, traded farm equipment or livestock for goods. This embedded in him a keen understanding of how to please customers, even those incapable of “paying” for his products. Pursue all tasks with the idea that they can be accomplished in a superior fashion. Watson Sr. told his employees, “It is better to aim at perfection and miss than it is to aim at imperfection and hit it.” This set a tone of “optimism, enthusiasm, excitement and pace.” There is the story about a young salesperson who completely messed up and lost a significant sale to a major customer. He was summoned to the chairman’s office fully expecting to be fired. Watson listened to the young man and, after offering him guidance, told him that he had invested too much money in him to fire him. It was this optimistic tone that led to the senior Watson to hire salespeople even during the Depression. He told a competitor that men of his age always do something “foolish.” He added “some men play too much poker, and others bet on horse races ... my hobby is hiring salespeople.” When business picked up the following year and boomed after the war, he appeared to be not so foolish after all. By the end of my 30 years in 1993, there was a decided shift in the importance and relevance of the above principles. Financial issues caused major changes in management and associated changes in organization principles. As pointed out by Lou Gerstner, who took the helm in 1993, these principles, also known as the Basic Beliefs within IBM, “had morphed from wonderfully sound principles into something virtually unrecognizable. At best they were now homilies. We needed something more, something prescriptive.” The effect on performance by this shift in organization principles is debatable. However, measurements at the bottom line were not that impressive. A 24/7Wallst.com report in 2014 listed IBM as the worst managed company. Though a market leader in IT consulting and hardware, it struggled to respond to the shift from servers and mainframes to cloud computing storage and software. In the first three quarters of 2014, the company’s hardware unit revenues fell by 16%, and its pretax loss grew to $354 million. Even as IBM’s cloud computing sales expanded, its annualized $3.1 billion in cloud services revenue were a fraction of its nearly $100 billion in total revenues. The struggling hardware business hurt IBM’s other segments as its units often are co-dependent. Much of that gloom, however, has tended to erode and in 2019, some predict a strong comeback for IBM, especially with the now-strong focus on cloud computing. In subsequent articles, we will discuss companies that have become successful and there is a strong hint of the application of original Watson-style beliefs that led to the great success of IBM early on. Respect for the individual has to be maintained for the long-term success of the business. No amount of financial goodness will last when loss of respect eventually drains the business of the best performers