Digital Taylorism

A modern version of “scientific management” threatens to dehumanise the

workplace

Print edition | Business

Sep 10th 2015

FREDERICK TAYLOR was the most influential management guru of the

early 20th century. His “Principles of Scientific Management” was the first
management blockbuster. His fans included Henry Ford, who applied
many of his ideas in his giant River Rouge car plant, and Vladimir Lenin,
who regarded scientific management as one of the building blocks of
socialism. Taylor’s appeal lay in his promise that management could be
made into a science, and workers into cogs in an industrial machine. The
best way to boost productivity, he argued, was to embrace three rules:
break complex jobs down into simple ones; measure everything that
workers do; and link pay to performance, giving bonuses to high-achievers
and sacking sluggards.

Scientific management provoked a backlash. Aldous Huxley satirised it in

“Brave New World” (1932), as did Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times”
(1936). A rival school of managers argued that workers are more
productive if you treat them as human beings. But a recent article about
Amazon in the New York Times suggests that Taylorism is thriving. The
article claimed that the internet retailer uses classic Taylorist techniques to
achieve efficiency: workers are constantly measured and those who fail to
hit the numbers are ruthlessly eliminated, personal tragedies
notwithstanding. Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, insisted that he did not
recognise the company portrayed in the piece. Nevertheless, it provoked
quite a reaction: the article attracted more than 5,800 online comments, a
record for a Times article, and a remarkable number of commenters
claimed that their employers had adopted similar policies. Far from being
an outlier, it would seem that Amazon is the embodiment of a new trend,
digital Taylorism.

This new version of Taylor’s theory starts with his three basic principles of
good management but supercharges them with digital technology and
applies them to a much wider range of employees—not just Taylor’s
industrial workers but also service workers, knowledge workers and
managers themselves. In Taylor’s world, managers were the lords of
creation. In the digital world they are mere widgets in the giant corporate
computer.

Technology allows the division of labour to be applied to a much wider

range of jobs: companies such as Upwork (formerly oDesk) are making a
business out of slicing clerical work into routine tasks and then
outsourcing them to freelances. Technology also allows time-and-motion
studies to be carried to new levels. Several firms, including Workday and
Salesforce, produce peer-review software that turns performance
assessments from an annual ritual into a never-ending trial. Alex Pentland
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented a “sociometric”
badge, worn around the neck, that measures such things as your tone of
voice, gestures and propensity to talk or listen. Turner Construction is
using drones to monitor progress on a sports stadium it is building in
California. Motorola makes terminals that strap to warehouse workers’
arms to help them do their jobs more efficiently—but could also be used to
keep tabs on them.

As stopwatch management continues to conquer new territory, so too does

pay for performance. The more firms depend on the brainpower of their
employees, the more they are seeking to reward their finest minds with
high salaries and stock options. “A great lathe operator commands several
times the wage of an average lathe operator,” Bill Gates points out, “but a
great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average
software writer.” Many firms, including Amazon, apply the same
Darwinian logic to their worst performers as well, in a process known as
“rank and yank”: workers are regularly ranked by productivity and the
weakest are culled.

The reaction to the Times piece shows that digital Taylorism is just as
unpopular as its stopwatch-based predecessor. Critics make some powerful
points. “Gobbetising” knowledge jobs limits a worker’s ability to use his
expertise creatively, they argue. Measuring everything robs jobs of their
pleasure. Pushing people to their limits institutionalises “burn and churn”.
Constant peer-reviews encourage back-stabbing. Indeed, some firms that
graded their staff, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture,
concluded that it is counter-productive, and dropped it.

The meatware fights back

The march of technology can cut both ways. The rise of smart machines
may make Taylorism irrelevant in the long term: why turn workers into
machines when machines can do ever more? The proliferation of websites
such as Glassdoor, which let employees review their workplaces, may
mean that firms which treat their workers as mere “meatware” lose the war
for the sort of talent that cannot be mechanised. And Mr Pentland’s
sociometric badges have produced some counter-intuitive results: for
example, in a study of 80 employees in a Bank of America call centre, he
found that the most successful teams were the ones that spent more time
doing what their managers presumably didn’t want them to do: chatting
with each other.

Even so, digital Taylorism looks set to be a more powerful force than its
analogue predecessor. The prominent technology firms that set the tone for
much of the business world are embracing it. Google, which hires a few
thousand people a year from up to 3m applicants, constantly ranks its
employees on a five-point scale. Investors seem to like Taylorism:
Amazon’s share price ticked upwards after the Times’s exposé. The
onward march of technology is producing ever more sophisticated ways of
measuring and monitoring human resources. And Taylorist managers are
mixing the sweet with the bitter: Amazon’s “Amabots”, as they call
themselves, seem happy to put up with micromanagement if they get a
nice bonus at the end of the year. The most basic axiom of management is
“what gets measured gets managed”. So the more the technology of
measurement advances, the more we hand power to Frederick Taylor’s
successors.
Additional Info
Notes on Digital/Neo taylorism

Digital Taylorism involves management's use of technology to monitor workers and make sure
they are employing these tools and techniques at a satisfactory level.
Digital Taylorism has the main characteristics of being standard, mechanistic, inflexible, and
precise.

Management breaks down every task and standardizes an exact procedure that should be
followed to complete that task. In doing so it turns the overall job completion into a mechanistic,
machine-like process. Each worker is completing their task exactly as they have been instructed
to by management, similar to a machine that has been programmed to perform a specific task in
a specific way. If something goes wrong with a worker, they are replaced just like a broken part in
a machine.
The standard nature of Digital Taylorism provides for a certain level of precision. Since everyone
is operating in a predetermined way, it increases predictability and consistency while limiting
error. Through the use of different technologies, Digital Taylorism also allows management to
more precisely monitor their subordinates to ensure maximum productivity. While
such standardization may increase precision, this type of inflexibility tends to inhibit creativity and
growth within organizations.
As a result of the continually changing workforce, Digital Taylorism can be found in many
organizations. One example of this is grocery industry. In an Australian grocery store, the
supplier, transporter, warehouse, and retailer all use Digital Taylorism to go about everyday tasks
and monitor workers. The grocery store believes this is the best way to be the most efficient,
least costly, and most productive. This particular grocery store refers to their methods as
“computerized or New Taylorism”.[1]
School systems are also using this method of New Taylorism to better the students and faculty.
Schools are finding new ways to make sure students are being taught the most efficient methods
in order to succeed and meet the standards. New Taylorism can be seen through the written
curriculum in schools in the United States.[2]
Another example of Digital Taylorism being used in the workplace is found in organizations who
use surveillance systems to monitor workers and make sure they are on task at all times; the
percentage of surveillance being used in the workplace is continually growing. Phones and
computers that employees use at work are being monitored in order to make sure everything is
being done in the most efficient way.[3] Workflow management system can be viewed as a form of
Digital Taylorism. For instance, marketing automation can be integrated into customer
relationship management to reduce and replace the need for human labour. Even so, such
system or technologies are not meant to replace human work but instead designed to intuitively
solve human needs, such that they can better focus on the bigger picture and the important
aspects