↖ Homepage of the site 'What to do with your life?'
What shapes the work atmosphere?
What shapes the work atmosphere is whether exchanges concerning encountered problems are based on the pragmatic consideration of facts and collaboration aimed at finding practical solutions, or whether they are dominated by considerations of personal ambitions, resentments, and the primacy of 'best practices' over the facts themselves.
Typology of group work functioning
The ideal group
All individuals adopt a positive attitude, respectful of others and of facts. Individuals coordinate in a flexible and informal manner.
The usual group
As soon as the ideal group incorporates individuals whose social ambition exceeds their technical skills, or who present problematic personalities, the group's functioning tends to degrade. Constructive exchanges aimed at effectively addressing on-the-ground problems become hindered, and individuals who could have functioned harmoniously in an ideal group feel oppressed.
The following symptoms appear, in whole or in part:
•
|
Individuals invest their time in the game of alliances, in order to conquer positions of power, or simply to denigrate.
|
•
|
Ideology (respect for best practices, undemonstrated) takes precedence over on-the-ground realities.
Individuals protect themselves, hiding behind the application of these rules without further considering on-the-ground reality.
|
•
|
The hierarchical functioning shifts from authority based on competence (listening to the person with the most experience or competence regarding the subject at hand) to a dual hierarchical constraint: blind obedience from subordinates is expected... along with results, all while avoiding surfacing problems.
|
•
|
Operational performance declines. The functioning becomes bureaucratic. Discomfort at work increases. Indeed, operational effectiveness becomes increasingly tied solely to the pressure exerted by hierarchy.
|
The managed group
The voluntary implementation of a system, which can be called Gemba, Talk, or more simply issue log, channels exchanges toward resolving on-the-ground problems, thereby restoring harmonious group functioning and operational effectiveness.
This system aims to:
•
|
Make on-the-ground problems visible and foster cross-functional exchanges (being concerned with the problems of others).
|
•
|
Educate individuals in the technique of systematic problem-solving (observe, analyze, find improvement solutions, implement).
|
Opposed to the implementation of such a system are individuals with social ambition too high relative to their actual skills, and individuals presenting certain problematic personalities. The voluntary issue log system prevents some of these individuals from disrupting the harmonious functioning of the entire group, provided they remain a minority... and the top leader supports the initiative.
Evaluation of organizational performance
A well-organized workload simply requires that each person easily find the information they need, at the moment they need it. Easy to say, less easy to do.
Being poorly organized always translates into a decline in work quality and productivity, as well as an increase in stress. Let us list the different archetypes of poor work organization.
•
|
In a completely unorganized work group, people speak to transmit instructions, that is, the information necessary for proper work execution, as well as the coordination of its progress.
This forces everyone to rapidly and regularly switch mental contexts to answer impromptu questions from colleagues, receive information at any moment, and make a significant memory effort to use it when needed.
|
•
|
With the widespread adoption of email, the unorganized group centered around the mailbox emerged.
Processing a large volume of emails results in a high workload with no added value, which hampers productivity. On one hand, useful information in each email tends to be diluted and non-standardized; on the other, this forces each person to invent a personal organization, often poor because too localized, to file emails and potentially retrieve them when needed.
Finally, in practice, this leads to an unnecessarily high number of back-and-forths between different stakeholders in a file, ultimately producing the same symptoms as the absence of organization, namely the obligation for individuals to rapidly and regularly switch mental contexts as they move from one email to another.
|
•
|
Finally, a group that has not seriously studied its production process uses overly approximate forms. This results in wasted time collecting missing information, potentially requiring interrupting colleagues, thereby producing the same symptoms as the absence of organization. It also results in lower production quality due to disparate interpretations of instructions.
|
In a well-organized group, all information necessary for proper work execution and coordination of its progress is transmitted via specific forms and reports for each activity, in paper or digital format. People still talk, but to engage in problem solving, which presupposes hierarchical and technical freedom to modify the organization.
Deepen
Refer to chapter 9 'The Issue Log' of the book From Capital to Reason.
Also see the questions 'What do best practices represent in the world of work?' and 'What conditions must be met to produce serious reasoning? Problem solving.'