Human Resources: Thought Leaders, November 2, 2006

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Thought Leader: Ed Lawler on The New American Workplace

Ed Lawler is a name that should be familiar to those of you who have been around the HR world. He is at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and within that he leads the Centre for Effective Organizations. Ed has written 41 books over the years, and the one I would like to mention in addition to this work on The New American Workplace is one called Build to Change. That's another significant book looking at how organizations need to be designed so that they can survive in a world that is constantly changing.

DC: Ed, tell us about The New American Workplace.

EL: The history of this project goes back to the early 1970's when my co-author Jim O'Toole was working for the federal government in the United States in the Health, Education and Welfare Department. Elliot Richardson was head of that department (some of you may remember his name from the Watergate issues; he was one of the few heroes of that whole saga). The department commissioned Jim to get a number of position papers and do research on what work was like in the United States in the 1970's and look particularly at some of the health risks involved in the way we structured and designed work. Jim chose to look at accidents and those areas of physical safety, but he focused strongly on the condition of jobs and the consequences that the structure of work has for people, particularly their mental health, their well-being, and of course their satisfaction.

That work was published in a book called Work in America, which was extremely popular at the time, produced some Congressional hearings, and quite a bit of debate in the leading papers. It stayed in print until just recently when we replaced it with our new volume. For years Jim and I have talked about moving on and doing a new analysis of the American workplace to update that one. We finally got money to do that from the Society for Human Resource Management and partnered with them in both data collection and in some of the work that went on to make the book possible. In addition, of course, they gave us some much need financial support.

We did a number of things to gather data for this report. We did a survey of the Fortune 1000, we went and analyzed some new and old data from national samples drawn by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, we held focus groups, and probably most importantly, we commissioned 16 papers from leading experts in various areas of the American workplace. Those have now been published separately from our work in a book that we edited and called America at Work and I can strongly recommend those papers to you. They are very well written, thoughtful pieces. They are based on research, but they are not pure academic papers that are difficult to read by any means. They are right on target with the current issues and we had just an exceptional group of authors that wrote those papers, including Jeffrey Pfeffer, Peter Cappelli and Wayne Cascio, who share widely different viewpoints on what's going on in the American workplace.

We have looked at health, work/family conflicts and a whole bunch of issues that I'm going to turn to now, based on those papers. Let me begin then with what we looked at. We broke the book up into changes, consequence and choices. Let me just quickly identify the changes; I think most of them will be familiar to you so I will not need to go into a great deal of detail.

Clearly the work itself has changed dramatically from the 1970's. Information technology, the employee involvement movement, the total quality management movement, re-engineering, offshoring and the changing role of supervisors have all had a major impact on the nature of the work itself in developed countries, certainly not just in the United States. Consequences of that we will see in a moment, but I just want to key up the point that the actual work that people do and the way they do it has changed dramatically.

In some ways, offshoring has sent a lot of low-level unskilled repetitive tasks offshore as well as some more knowledge-based tasks offshore. Reengineering created a downsizing of many companies, a reduction of management levels. TQM changed many of the work processes that people did. Employee involvement changed the work structure around the discretion that employees have, involved them more in decision making where it was seriously implemented and the nature of work depended upon which portfolio of these changes that a particular workplace chose to implement. Significant changes in the nature of the work have occurred, as we will see when we start talking about consequences, some of which I think were for the better, and some of which perhaps were not for the better.

DC: Many of the ideas that were written up in the original 1972 report have become commonplace and it's these kinds of reports that set the intellectual stage for how we all understand an era. So it's great that this kind of work is being done because that's the basis from which everyone else moves forward.

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David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research and a well-known writer, research and speaker on critical issues in human capital management. David’s previous work includes Chief of Content and Research for HR.com, in addition to working as a management consultant in Canada and Malaysia, most notably with the Hay Group.

David holds an MBA from the University of Western Ontario and has also taught Rewards and Performance Measures at the University of Malaya executive MBA program. David’s clients include think tanks, consultants, academics and organizations from around the globe. His current focus, in collaboration with Dave Ulrich, is on what organizations should report about human capital intangibles to the financial markets (see www.rbl.net "What the Fortune 50 Tells Wall Street").

David Creelman can be reached by email at creelmanresearch[at]gmail.com

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Tom Rath on Friendships at Work - A Strategic Lever for Increasing Engagement

November 6, 2006
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