What, one might ask, is so unusual about all this, except for the electronic gadgetry? Publishers, after all, rely on authors scribbling at home for their new material. Homeworkers have knitted sweaters, addressed envelopes, marked examination papers, typed scripts, cooked pies and made quilts for centuries. The Japanese have always relied on a cottage industry tradition of small manufacturers and assemblers as the raft on which to build their huge enterprises. What is new is the higher skills, qualifications and status of the new homeworkers. The Department of Employment in Britain discovered in 1987, probably to its surprise, that some of the highest paid workers worked at home. The rate for one fifth of all the homeworkers in their survey put them in the top 10 per cent of all earnings. Homeworkers are out, telecommuters are in. It’s all in the language but it is the language which signals the change, the change from freak to fashion.
Telecommuters have choice; they can choose to work before the commuter trains start running or when offices are long closed. They can commute by telephone or computer link from wherever, can move house without moving job, can revel in the occasional hour of sunshine or take time off to celebrate an anniversary with no one’s permission to obtain; they can work fast or work slowly, by the fire or in the attic. It is not, however, to everyone’s taste. For some it is too lonely, or the temptations of home become too great; one American lady complained that she put on two stone because of frequent trips to the fridge, and one man attributed his divorce to the fact that he was at home all the time.
Yet what today seems yuppie and freaky may be tomorrow’s commonplace. The telephone has turned out to be the most user-friendly of all modern inventions and as its permutations and ramifications extend it will start to revolutionize ordinary occupations. The carphone and the cordless telephone have surprised even the most optimistic of manufacturers by their popularity. The fax is bringing handwriting back into fashion as we find that we can instantaneously reproduce our scribbled notes or diagrams half a world away. The computer and its screen, linked to a telephone cable, becomes a message box for the world, one which your local store can use to sell its wares, your friends to leave their calls, your business its memos, and now that we call it keyboard skills rather than typing (new words again!) everybody can learn to use it without loss of face or dignity.
In September 1988 the Confederation of British Industry organized a huge conference in London on ‘teleworking’ along with British Telecom, to celebrate an ‘idea whose time has come’, to quote Francis Kinsman and in recognition of their estimate that by 1995 there will be 4 million teleworkers in Britain. Four million people cannot escape notice even if they are working from home. The world is changing.
The Club Centre
One sign of the electronic shamrock will be a new concept of the central office. At present the office is an apartment house, a collection of private apartments for executives with all the attendant service functions. It is an expensive way of accommodating the work, something that became very obvious on a recent visit to one such office in central London. The chief executive was thinking of re-designing the floor layout to allow, he said, for more informal interaction between his executives, for more meeting rooms and rooms dedicated to particularly expensive pieces of electronic hardware. He showed me round to point out the disadvantages of the present layout of rooms as rows, or rather layers and layers (for it was a tall narrow building) of individual offices.
‘But they are all empty,’ I exclaimed.
‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘they are all out doing business, seeing clients, attending meetings, gathering information, making deals. They only come in here to file their reports, attend departmental meetings or deal with their correspondence.
‘Costed per hour of occupancy,’ I said, ‘you must have the most expensive rooms in London. You ought to see my friend Walter.’
‘Why?’ he asked, not unnaturally.
‘Walter,’ I explained, ‘runs a design and consultancy business with a staff of around 100 professionals – quite big. He runs it from a converted warehouse, except that he hasn’t converted it very much. There are no offices in it. There are meeting rooms, there is a superb farmhouse kitchen, there are drawing-boards scattered around, there are word-processors, telephones and computers abounding but no one, not even Walter himself, has any private space – except for the secretaries, who are really not secretaries as such but project co-ordinators, each assigned to work for a project rather than for an individual.’
When I asked him why he’d done this, Walter told me, ‘I don’t want my designers and consultants spending their time here in this very expensive space. I would rather they were out with the client or working at home where I will provide any equipment they want. They only come in here for meetings, to use some specialist equipment and, generally, to keep in touch. We lay on the best breakfasts in town in that kitchen of ours and there’s always a bottle of wine open and waiting for anyone dropping in after 6.00 pm. It’s a working club really.’
Indeed it was, a working club, a club being a place of privileged access to common facilities. A club not an apartment house. Turning the office into a club allows one to equip it far more lavishly and comfortably than a set of individual offices and to make sure that all the space is properly used. The idea of a club centre only works, however, if people have somewhere else to be, at home, with clients, out on business. It is the perfect facility for a network of individuals linked into a small core (in Walter’s case the core was primarily the project co-ordinators).
F International, interestingly, is creating a number of regional work centres, places where their individual workers can go when they need to attend team meetings, use more specialist equipment or just want to escape from their homes and meet people. The work centres are working clubs and we shall see more of them because they are cost effective.
The shamrock organization, always there in embryo, has flourished because organizations have realized that you do not have to employ all of the people all of the time to get the work done. They are now going further and are counting the cost of having all of them around in the same place for all of the time. Offices for part-timers become common-rooms for telecommuters and, in time, clubs for everyone. The early morning crush in the commuter train will one day be a thing of the past or at least only a twice-weekly chore.
Homeworking is not, traditionally, good working – particularly for women. Men have in the past had the fun jobs, going out to work. For women, the paid work at home has been lonely, monotonous, trivial and badly paid. More homeworking, even glamorized by words like telecommuting, would not therefore seem to be good news. Times, however, may be changing.
Catherine Hakim, in Britain, has done an extensive analysis of homeworkers in Britain in 1981 for the Department of Employment. Even in 1981, she reports, the usual picture of homeworking – of work typically done by women, tied to the home with few or no skills, exploited and in poor health – was highly misleading and only applied to the small percentage doing manufacturing homework.
Her survey concluded that homeworkers are more highly qualified than most, in better health than most, and more likely to own their own homes. Many of the women in the survey were making conscious trade-offs between the flexibility of homework and the relatively low-paid job available, which probably explains why the majority of homeworkers say they are satisfied with their pay and conditions.
On the other hand, Barbara Baran in the United States studied women’s work in the insurance industry and concluded that although the new technologies may be freeing women from the pink-collar assembly lines and even raising skill levels of the female workforce, there is, in the end, she says ‘little cause for good cheer’. For women at the bottom end of the clerical hierarchy, jobs are simply disappearing. For skilled and particularly white clericals there will be jobs but not career opportunities. In one company one sixth of their clerical staff (mostly women) were working from home. Numbers of college-educated women may make th
eir way into professional and managerial ranks only to find their talents, she says, under-utilized and undervalued.
Yet she also reports from companies in her study who had moved their operations from major cities to adjacent suburban areas in search of a higher quality clerical workforce – the labour pool of educated women with small children. Automation, she was told, is raising skill requirements and forcing insurance companies to relocate to be nearer high quality labour. Perhaps not all women want to be career professionals like men. if they don’t then homeworking may be good news, with new types of work and new technology.
The Challenges Of The Shamrock
On the face of it the shamrock organization is logical. Logic, however, does not necessarily imply ease and these are not easy organizations to run. Meetings, planned or ad hoc, teams and committees are a familiar feature of organizations and they survive and flourish in the core, but to try to fix a quick meeting with members of the contractual fringe is a recipe for frustration and disappointment for these are the meetings that have to be negotiated weeks in advance with great comparing of diaries, inevitable absentees and compromises. Each leaf of the shamrock has to be managed differently and must yet be somehow part of the whole. The shamrock, after all, symbolizes three different aspects of one whole, three in one and one in three.
Accepting and recognizing the need for differences is only the start. The most difficult of policy decisions concerns what and who belongs in the core, what activities and which people. Too often organizations drift into this decision, gradually hiving off functions until they are left with what is inconceivable or too inconvenient to give to others. It is not an obvious choice; most organizations, if they start thinking radically enough, can justify out-sourcing, to use the current jargon, almost anything. In one organization such a brain storming exercise left only the chief executive and a car phone! A growing subsidiary business today is dedicated to answering customer complaints – on behalf of other businesses! It is a service which big companies contract out, wisely or not, getting a periodic analysis of the complaints as part of the deal.
Even more contentious can be the question of who belongs in the core and for how long. Smaller, flatter, more intense organizations tend to be younger. The older men cannot always stand the pace, can get out-of-date in some technologies, or become, in general, too expensive for the value which they add. The fixed-term contracts of the armed services will increasingly be a feature of the new cores. As we shall see in Chapter 6, the task of keeping the core people up-to-date and mentally alert and open is one of increasing importance to all organizations. Fewer people means better people; there is no room now for incompetence or passengers in today’s cores. This pressure for quality in turn means greater selectivity on entry. More will be demanded of the aspiring executive, with more organizations tempted towards the ultimate Catch 22 of employment – ‘We won’t hire you unless you have previous successful experience in this area’. Rather like an actor in pursuit of an Equity card without which no acting job is possible but which you cannot apply for without an acting job, it is hard today to know where to begin.
The core is the critical hub of an organizational network. It is essential to get it right and to manage it right.
5 The Federal Organization
ALONGSIDE THE EMERGING shamrock organization we can discern the gradual development of the federal organization. Federalism implies a variety of individual groups allied together under a common flag with some shared identity. Federalism seeks to make it big by keeping it small, or at least independent, by combining autonomy with cooperation. It is the method which businesses are slowly, and painfully, evolving for getting the best of both worlds – the size which gives them clout in the market-place and in the financial centres, as well as some economies of scale, and the small unit size which gives them the flexibility which they need, as well as the sense of community for which individuals increasingly hanker.
The Nature of Federalism
Federalism is not a classy word for decentralization. The differences are important and are too little understood by monarchical countries like Britain which has always regarded federalism as something more appropriate for departing colonies or vanquished enemies because, presumably, it would keep them divided and therefore weak, in spite of much historical evidence that it tends to do exactly the opposite.
Decentralization implies that the centre delegates certain tasks or duties to the outlying bits while the centre remains in overall control. The centre does the delegating, and initiates and directs. Thus it is that we have that most consistent of organizational findings, the more an organization decentralizes its operations the greater the flow of information to and from the centre. The centre may not be doing the work in a decentralized organization, but it makes sure that it knows how the work is going. The new technology, of course, makes it even easier for that information to flow more copiously and more immediately than ever, making it ever easier to contemplate still further decentralization, in theory at least.
Federalism is different. In federal countries states are the original founding groups, coming together because there are some things which they can do better jointly (defence is the obvious example) than individually. The centre’s powers are given to it by the outlying groups, in a sort of reverse delegation. The centre, therefore, does not direct or control so much as co-ordinate, advise, influence and suggest – all words which are familiar currency in the Head Offices of multinationals, multinationals who have often been forced into federalism because of the local priorities of their subsidiaries.
Federal organizations, therefore, are reverse thrust organizations; the initiative, the drive and the energy comes mostly from the bits, with the centre an influencing force, relatively low in profile. Switzerland is a good example of the federal principle at work, a country both peaceful and prosperous, in many ways the envy of its European neighbours. Surely, one would have thought, her government would be much admired, her President’s name on every lip. It is instead ironic that even when he is host to a summit conference no one readily remembers who he is, or, to be precise, who he was, because the job rotates. It is seen as a chairman’s role, the chairman of a co-ordinating group who seek to guide but not direct the nation’s affairs, important but low in profile.
Federal organizations are, as a result, tight-loose organizations, to use the management jargon. The centre holds some decisions very tight to itself, usually, and crucially, the choice of how to spend new money and where and when to place new people. This gives them the means to shape the long-term strategy and to influence its execution through the key executives. It is a way of working long familiar to other institutions. I once asked the Headmaster of one of England’s more famous independent schools how he changed the place. ‘I choose the new heads of houses and heads of departments; I allocate resources to some new facilities,’ he said, ‘and then I wait ten years for the results.’
Federalism, however, is not a free or willing choice for most organizations. There is, as far as I know, no example in history of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its component parts. Federal constitutions arise when individual states decide to merge together, as in Australia, or when the central power is destroyed by war or revolution, as in West Germany, and no one, inside or out, wants to see so much power in the centre again.
How then, one must ask, has federalism come to organizations? Not willingly, nor in most cases deliberately or even consciously. Once again this significant piece of discontinuity has crept up on us unawares. It has happened perforce because the reduced core of the organization cannot deal with the flood of information coming in from the decentralized operations. As the shamrock took shape, as a bigger organization grew more and smaller shamrocks it tried to run them all from the core at the centre, relying on the new technologies to provide all the information needed. The new technologies did not fail, but information, to be useful, still has to be interpreted by its human masters.
More information with more diversity needs more people to interpret it if it is not to lie unused in the piles of printout or in the unseen memories of the computers. Yet, paradoxically, organizations were all, as we have seen, seeking to contract their cores and cut down their staffers. In the end they have to stop asking for the information, have to stop trying to run everything from the centre, have to begin to let go. Then it is that decentralization turns into federalism, a discontinuity whose significance is not understood and not therefore developed by many a chief executive.
‘How many hundreds of people do you have in that Head Office of yours?’ I asked a friend of mine, a newly appointed Chief Executive of a multinational who had asked me to explain federalism. ‘Fifteen, I think,’ he said. ‘There you are,’ I said, slightly triumphantly, ‘the point about federalism is small centres, with the other parts doing the real work. With federal thinking you would not need fifteen hundred people cluttering up London’s airspace.’
‘I said fifteen,’ he replied, ‘not fifteen hundred. You see,’ he explained indulgently, ‘all my operations are done by independent companies. At the centre we collect their surpluses and invest them in new opportunities and we watch them to see that they are producing the surpluses we think they should. If they don’t we push the top people a bit and ultimately replace them. New ventures and new people, that’s my concern in the centre and I only need a few wise and a few clever people to help me.’
‘You don’t need me,’ I said, ‘you have discovered organizational federalism all by yourself.’
‘I would call it commonsense,’ he replied.
Fifteen people cannot even begin to think of controlling in any detail the operations of perhaps thirty different companies, divisions or operating units; they would not have time to even read the information which might be available. It is better in the end that they do not even try, but concentrate instead on the things they can control and the decisions which they alone should take. Small cores make federalism ultimately inevitable and large cores make decentralization ultimately too expensive. The slow imperative of economical reality pushes larger organizations into a new kind of world.
The Age Of Unreason Page 9
