From Servants To Friends

Work could be described as physical and mental activities, away from the home and for set periods within a social context and the social relations within which the activites are performed, more than the nature of the activity itself, according to instructions in return for a mixture of rewards and satisfactions including most importantly for most people, money. It is a combination of inputs to produce a variety of outputs. The nature of work and experience is changing, not least in terms of pay and conditions. Work has come from the rural and agricultural work on the farms and the country estates of pre-Industrial Revolution times to the industrial and technological work in the towns and cities of today.

There have been quite a number of movements to improve working life and conditions for people at work. The job redesign movement, the quality of working life movement, the business process re-engineering movement are three well known modern movements that promote greater autonomy and employee involvement (EI) as ways to improve working life for workers and increase efficiency for the company. The involvement-commitment cycle suggests that more involvement increases the commitment of staff to the firm's objectives and so on. By giving workers more freedom over their activities and in completing tasks, autonomous working groups proved successful. It has since been recognised by large and important industry groups and is common practice in many large manufacturing firms. ACAS once called EI the key to improved efficiency. The CBI said firms and workers are more likely to succeed with EI than when unininformed and uncommitted. The British Institute of Management once referred to the community of interest in the long term prospects and it has also been said that it is better when there is a climate that meets social needs of workers. It is important to experience meaningfulness in work, to have responsibility for outcomes and to have knowledge of its results. EI increases these and more. There are many critics of this movement and disagreement as to the degree of autonomy work groups should be given.

In the early days of the study of industrial work and job design, the classical school of Taylorism and Fordism, dehumanised work and made automatons of workers. The Human Relations School began a process of change but even the Hawthorn research produced nothing of great importance until 'ex post facto' developments produced the theories about motivation that gave us the later neo-Human Relations school of thought. The freedom to act spontaneously and creatively also helps generate the new ideas and developments to products and processes that drive progress and maintain continuity. Another sign of progress in working conditions is in the use of names and titles. First name terms are more likely than before when it was 'Sir', 'Madam' or 'Mr' especially on the shop floor. The spirit of 'friendliness' continues up the company hierarchy even where more formality has been retained. Many managers and even directors seem to be more approachable today than before.