Workers' control and management?

In my experience of business consultancy, the most useful management improvements, the most immediate and probably the most inexpensive, come from implementing relatively unsophisticated, "low-tech" (or, at least, "mainstream-tech") projects. To the detriment of so many firms, senior managers, especially those needing to make a career-enhancing impact, will often turn first to options that involve big budgets and wall-to-wall "transformational" programs (inevitably involving the hiring of expensive global consultancy firms).

Refreshingly, a recent article in the Financial Times (here) indicates that what's left of British manufacturing may be making some meaningful productivity gains by implementing just such "unsophisticated" projects. In this case they seem to amount to little more than delegating more decision-making to front-line workers and designing better products. According to the article, so far as the new management method is concerned, "The aim is to ensure [the workers] can make their own decisions about how to boost output and do not need detailed instructions from supervisers." These approaches have led to improvements in UK manufacturing productivity that, between 2000 and 2005, have bettered Germany and France, amongst others.

The article went on to say that, "According to Professor Stephen Wood, one of a team of workplace psychologists who supervised a study of the training methods of more than 300 companies, these efforts to empower workers are by far the most important of the various ways in which companies have sought to boost productivity."

I like what this implies. It gently questions the daily reinforced assumptions underpinning traditional management hierarchy - with its "thinkers" at the top and the "doers" at the bottom. Here's verifiable evidence, and there's much more of it, that maybe there are alternative management structural systems - systems which truly "flatten" the hierarchy and offer the possibility of job satisfaction coming from individual autonomy and real, co-operative control of the production process - from individual job content to the high level "value chain".

In the meantime, whilst the bosses think and workers work, another article in the very same FT (here) tells us that manufacturing employment in the UK is falling faster than most other places - a million jobs have been lost in the last 6 years.

"Manufacturing employment has fallen further in Britain in the past six years than in any of its main international competitors, according to data published on Monday.

While employment in UK factories has fallen by 21.7 per cent – from 4.2m to 3.2m – the number of manufacturing workers in the US has dropped 17.7 per cent over the same period. There were comparable falls in France, Japan, Germany and Italy of 13.5 per cent, 8.5 per cent, 6.8 per cent and 0.8 per cent respectively.... Since 2001, output volumes from UK plants have fallen by 1.3 per cent, a poor record by the standards of Germany, the US and Japan, which pushed up output by 18.6 per cent, 15 per cent and 12 per cent respectively."