Perspective 1: You’re a senior manager: you want to be able to delegate work at a high level, know who is working on what, and most importantly, make sure that your employees are working hard with top levels of productivity. Especially when you work long days, the most frustrating thing is a worker who sits around bludging with no work to do.
How should you deal with such working inefficiencies? Understanding people’s behaviour is a great place to start, allowing us to recognize how to increase our workers productivity.
Niccolo Machiaveli influenced politics and management for centuries through his book The Prince (1513). One of his major concepts was that people are motivated by self interest and people are motivated by fear. This concept was built upon, a few hundred years later, by Jeremy Bentham who designed the Panopticon. The Panopticon was a prison building, where a supervisor observes the prisoners, without the prisoners knowing whether they are being watched or not. This would create a “sentiment of an invisible omniscience”, where the prisoner would always under the fear of being watched. The result would be that the prisoner would always work as they were afraid of being caught not working. Bentham stated this to be a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind”, and is something that has been largely reflected in modern management studies and applications.
Both theorists suggested that people are motivated by fear, self interested, and to a certain degree will behave dishonestly unless scrutinised properly.
However are these the right assumptions to make?
Now let’s look at it a different way.
Perspective 2: You’re a junior member of staff: you want to know what jobs you’re booked on, and wish that you get the jobs that you desire and are good at. You want to be able to show your managers you’re capable of taking more responsibility. It’s irritating when managers don’t trust in your ability, or don’t trust in your integrity to get things done, instead, always watching over your shoulder. It’s also frustrating when you’re passionate about working in a certain area and are good at it, yet your managers usually forget.
It is true that people are motivated by incentives such as money; however employees also desire work satisfaction, being able to work on things they are interested in or naturally excel at. People also desire recognition, congratulations, friendships and a sense of community at their work. Furthermore, many people aren’t naturally dishonest, and have a set of morals, values, and integrity which they adhere to.
We need to treat our employees with a sense of transparency, trust and integrity in order to have it reciprocated. Although the principles laid down by theorists like Bentham and Machiavelli seem to ring true, we also need to reconsider the era we are living in. We are living in the world of Google, Face book, and the Virgin. Management is not only about enhancing productivity through a mechanised process, but through building positive relationships, transparency, encouraging creativity, and acknowledging the aspirations, interests and unique skills of each worker. We are living in a world with the internet and computers that allow us to achieve things we were never able to do before.
There are three things that managers today must remember:
(1) In the 21st century, managers don’t only need to maximise the productivity of our employees by providing them monetary incentives, and reviewing the work of their employees, but also should make sure that we allocate work that suits their interests, skills and aspirations of our employees.
(2) Furthermore, in the 21st century we can use software that means that we don’t need to waste time trying to fit our employee’s preferences to the right job, because the software can search and allocate the workers on the jobs we need at a click of a button.
(3) Finally managers need no longer to waste their time constantly checking up on who’s working on what, and how far they’ve gotten through. Instead, they should have software that keeps a transparent tab on what work has been allocated to whom, and when they have to get it done by – so that if there is a misunderstanding it can be resolved with trust and openness.
This should enable a level of productivity that no amount of fear or monetary incentive will be able to provide.
The final question becomes, where do we find software that will help us manage our employees? SAVIOM Resource Planning and Scheduling Software is a great example of such software. SAVIOM Resource Planning and Scheduling Software really understands that management has evolved with the times, and it is critical to support companies in being able to make the transition to new way of managing our people.
Author Resource:
SAVIOM is market leader in Resource Planning & Scheduling Software . This software is quite affordable and easy to use.
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