Increasing Human Efficiency

It is interesting, and more than a bit depressing, to read some of the classical works on topics such as management and economics - as it can very often be observed that a "new" trend is merely the revival of an idea that has been around for decades or centuries. And that there are many ideas that seem confounding simple - such that you can't read them without a sense of "of course this is so" and "why would anyone think otherwise" - but have been ignored or abandoned.

Reading Walter Dill Scott's book on Increasing Human Efficiency gave me exactly that sense.  Written in 1911, it outlines a number of ideas that seem entirely reasonable, and which have largely been ignored or forgotten over the course of the past century.   My sense is that productive workplaces employ at least some of the principles he mentions, and that unproductive ones ignore some or all of them.

There are so many principles in this book that are clearly beneficial to efficiency and effectiveness of work, and which are just as clearly being violated in many workplaces, that to do it justice would require re-typing the entire book - but to keep this meditation manageable, I'll focus on five ideas that seemed to strike a nerve.


The efficiency of work can only be improved by a change in the technique or technology by which it is done.  Simply insisting that men work faster and harder is insufficient.

Scott considers the practices of "scientific management" in which a manager observes his workers, notices the practices of those who are most efficient, and then teaches those practices to the less efficient worker in order to boost productivity.

Frank Gilbreth's work with masons is an excellent example: Gilbreth noticed the average worker used eighteen motions to lay a single brick, where the productive worker used but seven, and he was able to eliminate two of them.   By teaching a five-step process to a crew, he was able to boost the productivity from 40 bricks per hour per man to 120 - tripling the speed of work.

However, this practice does not seem to exist in the modern workplace.   Managers simply set production quotas without providing any indication of how they may be achieved: if you produced 1,000 units last month, you goal for this month is 1,100 or if you completed a task in thirty days you must now do it in twenty-eight.   Ask "how may I accomplish this?" and the answer will be "figure it out for yourself."

The bosses (who are not managing anything, merely bossing people around) do not even understand what a worker does, but insists that he must somehow figure out on his own a way to do it faster and better.  This is not scientific management by any means, and yet it is all too familiar to many workers.


In order to discover more efficient ways of working, the worker must be allowed to experiment with the process and technique by which he accomplishes a task.

Scott's insistence that men must be taught a process by which to work is mitigated by the insistence that they be provided some latitude in getting their work done: so long as their product is good and the rate of production is acceptable, they should be left alone.

The value in giving workers such latitude, and even being tolerant of some temporary decreases in productivity, is that they have the freedom to innovate - to deviate from standard practices and discover more efficient ways of working, which workers have an uncanny ability for doing.  If held too rigidly to standard procedures, the workers can only become as efficient as the procedure.

To discover a new method requires deviating from the prescribed method, in a process of trial and error to discover more efficient means of accomplishing a goal - with the risk that the new method may not be more efficient, and acceptance that a new method may be less efficient at first but be modified or habituated to gain proficiency.

But again, this does not happen. In the present day, workers are given the paradoxical command to "innovate while following procedures" - which is as logical as ordering them to "sit down while standing up."   It simply cannot be done, so workers end up following procedure - to attempt to innovate is to risk punishment merely for doing something in an unauthorized manner, and since the reward for success is paltry (if any at all) and the punishment of failure grievous, most workers regard innovation as an unacceptable risk.


When a worker's task is intellectual, more dependent on thought than physical action, he can only be productive if he is protected from distractions.

Scott gives special attention to the "intellectual worker," those who are in positions where the activity of their work is more mental than physical.   It would be entirely foolish to expect the task-worker to complete his work while he is constantly being physically jostled - and it is equally foolish to expect the mental-worker to give focus to his work while being constantly distracted.

This is clearly violated in the present workplace under the banner of "collaboration," which eliminates quiet places in the office in favor of creating an environment in which employees are constantly talking to one another, in meeting rooms or on the work floor, and having no opportunity to retreat to a quiet place and attend to the work that results from the conversation.

While it cannot be disputed that information exchange is a good thing, there can be too much of it.   In a circus-like environment in which there is too much noise and motion to remain focused on a thought for more than a few minutes, the mental worker simply cannot get tasks done in an efficient manner.   And yet, "open" office spaces with constant noise and distraction have come into fashion, in direct contradiction to Scott's principle of the necessity of concentration.


Loyalty is reciprocal.  An employer wins the loyalty of his workers by showing loyalty to them.  He cannot expect them to be attentive to his welfare unless he is attentive to theirs.

During the early industrial era, the workplace became a very unpleasant environment, and unions formed to protect the basic health and safety of workers, as well as to negotiate a fair wage, reasonable hours, and continuity of employment.  The result was a hostile relationship between employee and employer, and perhaps the worst in human history outside of the institution of slavery or serfdom.

An yet, even in his age of antipathy, there were stunning examples in which union workers would abdicate the terms of their contracts to give an extra effort to help employers in time of need: to work longer hours, accept less pay, and otherwise sacrifice for the good of their employers.

Scott was very quick to point out that "loyalty begets loyalty" and through real-world examples demonstrates that in every instance that workers were loyal to an employer during a time of crisis, the employer showed great loyalty to the workers well before the crisis arose.

There are many firms even in the present day that covet that level of devotion - and worse, who expect that level of devotion as a matter of course.   It is not uncommon for salaried workers to be expected to work fifty-hour weeks for no additional pay on a long-term basis (and sometimes on an ongoing basis), for exceptional performance to go unrewarded, for the annual increase in pay to be well below the increase in the cost of living.  And all of this from firms who wonder why employees have no loyalty to them.


Work becomes efficient when the worker is able to apply his skills in a consistent manner and discover methods of efficiency.  Any change disrupts his progress to efficiency, and constant change prevent him from ever becoming efficient.

Of all the various methods of increasing the efficiency of work, Scott considers habituation to be the most powerful.   The worker gains efficiency where there are consistent practices he may follow, devoting his attention to the things that are most important by being able to ignore the many things that are unimportant.   Any change in procedures, particularly for routine and inconsequential parts of a job, require attention and discipline until they can become routinized - and it is wholly unproductive if the practices that are changed are not contributing to production.

And yet, in the modern workplace, the pace of change is relentless.  Employees must constantly be attentive to the "new way" of doing something that is different to the "new way" it was done the month before.   It is insisted, without rationale, that changes bring improvement - but it is a consequence that constant change prevents efficiency from ever developing.  The employee is prodded from one awkward and unfamiliar way of doing things to another awkward and unfamiliar way, never becoming habituated enough to gain efficiency (and to reap the full benefit of the method prescribed).

It is not that change is universally undesirable, but should be mitigated: a change should be made when it provides an improvement to a process that creates greater efficiency in the work.  But in the present day, change is seldom explained - and it is wondered if it is ever considered in any meaningful way.   And moreover, many changes are implemented to create efficiency for non-productive staff (such as accounting clerks) by placing additional burden on productive staff (those who do the work to produce and deliver the product or service of the firm).

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In all, I have the pessimistic sense that I should perhaps simply stop reading so much to and instead focus my attention on mindless acceptance of things such as they are.   Knowledge of a better way only makes the present ways more noxious - and discovering that the "better way" has existed for decades or centuries but has simply been ignored depresses me profoundly.