How the specter of Frederick Taylor continues to haunt organizations
(In our article The capitalist urge to measure everything (and why it hurts business), we explored the limits of measurement and why organizations give in to the temptation of measuring work in the name of enhancing productivity. Here, we expand on those themes by exploring the historical reasons for management by measurement, its implications for the modern workplace, and a more sustainable alternative.)
Employers reduce their employees to numbers on dashboards that track their productivity and behavior, while constantly monitoring every little activity they do at work through covert and overt surveillance.
This isn't the log line of an upcoming dystopian movie, but the reality of modern work.
Today, it's second nature for an organization to view its workforce through a metrics-addled lens, measuring every activity they do (and don't do). The reason usually provided is something along these lines: An organization has an imperative to ensure its employees are productive so that the business is healthy. A healthy business rakes in profits, of which employees get a share as well through incentives and stock options.
This line of thinking—that work needs to be measured and improved into perfection—isn't a recent invention. Tracing its roots, we arrive at the early 20th century, when the discipline of scientific management was espoused by a mechanical engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor.
How workplaces became Taylor-made
No one can be found who will deny that in the case of any single individual the greatest prosperity can exist only when that individual has reached his highest state of efficiency; that is, when he is turning out his largest daily output.
— Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911)
Originally trained to be a mechanical engineer, Taylor went on to become a management consultant and, with the publication of the book The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, a management theorist. These principles, which eventually came to be known as Taylorism, were developed for factories at the height of the Industrial Revolution, with the intent of helping managers solve inefficiencies caused by workers on the shop floor.
Taylor's four principles of scientific management are paraphrased below:
Develop a science for each element of work: Replace rule-of-thumb methods like guesswork or tradition with a scientific study of the task. This involves gathering objective data, performing experiments, and standardizing the most efficient way to perform every step of a job.
Scientifically select, train, and develop the worker: Management must scientifically select individuals who are best suited for specific roles. Once selected, these workers must be systematically trained and developed to perform the task according to the established scientific method.
Cooperate with the worker: To ensure that all work is done in accordance with these principles developed, management must cooperate closely with workers.
Divide work and responsibility nearly equally between management and workers: Instead of letting workers plan and execute work, management should take over all the planning, preparing, and organizing, while workers focus on executing the tasks exactly as instructed.
Taylor laid the foundations of modern management that's marked by rational systems to coordinate and control different types of work—and his influence is felt even today. Henry Ford set up the assembly line at Ford Motor Company partly inspired by Taylorism, sparking the automobile revolution. Henry Gantt, who worked under Taylor, developed the Gantt chart that's still used in project management.
Despite being over a hundred years old and seemingly having little relevance in the sphere of knowledge work, Taylorism is deeply embedded in the modern workplace.
The emphasis on gathering data and standardized processes has resulted in our current metrics-driven work culture. Scientific selection and training of employees is visible in recruitment practices and onboarding. Performance reviews, incentive structures, and use of digital monitoring tools are all designed to enforce strict adherence to management’s processes. Finally, the top-down approach to management, where the distinction between the "thinkers" who plan the work (leadership and managers) and the "doers" who simply execute it (individual contributors), is seen everywhere from enterprises to startups.
Digital Taylorism and its discontents
When a person knows they're being observed, they will modify their behavior automatically to look good in the eyes of the observer. This psychological phenomenon, known as the Hawthorne effect, can help us understand the impact of Taylorism in the modern workplace.
An investigation by the New York Times revealed that eight out of ten largest private companies in the U.S.—an overwhelming majority—track the productivity metrics of individual employees, irrespective of whether they're in-person or remote. Often in real time, employees are subjected to digital surveillance using trackers and scores that measure the extent of their productivity and "idleness." Any unapproved pauses, including bathroom breaks, are penalized—sometimes with loss of pay, and other times with loss of employment.
This shows the extent of how firmly entrenched companies are in what's described as "digital Taylorism," where employees are measured and monitored using technology with a level of sophistication and scrutiny that Taylor couldn't have imagined. When employees know they're being watched, the Hawthorne effect kicks in, and they engage in "performative work" to give the false appearance of working hard instead of actually doing substantial work.
The quest to measure and monitor obsessively in the guise of enhancing productivity has resulted in companies operating with serious trust deficit. When employees don't feel trusted by the employer to do their work, it leads to a cascade of negative emotions—anxiety, alienation, and disengagement—that destroys the very productivity that such compulsive measurement purports to enhance.
No wonder then that a Gallup poll on workplaces across the world revealed that a whopping 79% of employees are either not engaged or actively disengaged at work, and 50% of employees are watching for or actively seeking a new job.
Taming Taylor's specter
A disengaged workforce is bad news for organizations looking to remain in business for a long time. For an organization's long-term success, it needs employees who are invested: who stay long enough and hold together the different moving parts, spot flaws and propose fixes, and help in tiding over crises instead of jumping ship.
So more Taylorism—more management through measurement—is never the answer. The remedy for employee disengagement lies in recontextualizing the principles of scientific management to grant employees a greater sense of autonomy and trust.
Dismantling the constant surveillance would require organizations trusting the employees they've hired. Instead of treating employees as merely doers of given tasks, managers must clearly define the outcomes, entrust them with making decisions in the organization's best interest, and measure them by the outcomes—not inputs. Rather than slotting people into rigid boxes, organizations should provide the resources for continuous learning and mastery, acknowledging that employees grow out of their roles, not just into them.
More importantly, organizations should acknowledge that certain things—dedication, passion, and loyalty—are intangible and can't be seen on dashboards. At Zoho, we have taken a strong stance against measurement: Nurturing intangible assets like our culture, our people, and our passion matter more to us than obsessing over metrics on dashboards and spreadsheets. Just because something can be measured doesn't mean it should be—we're clear in this regard.
The path forward for organizations isn't in using better KPIs but in building an organizational culture that seeks to empower instead of control and redefines productivity in terms of outcomes. Only then, as Taylor wrote over a century ago, can employees reach their "highest state of efficiency" in the workplace.
