Workers' Liberty

Increasingly in the Civil service, and probably in the public sector generally, there is a move to fragment jobs and functions i.e. to introduce further division of labour.

Therefore it is good to report an interesting experiment in the Driving Standards Agency (DSA), which is part of the Department for Transport, that flows contrary to this tide of work fragmentation.

Call Centres are traditionally organized where functions are split between the workers so that one set of call operators handle “x” type of calls. There is strict supervision of work with operators given work targets and set times by which they have to finish a call. Escalation procedures are in place if a call is supposedly complex which means that a supervisor or another specialist handles calls if they are likely to last longer than the target time. So an operator rarely has knowledge of all the types of work carried out in a centre. Operators have no control over work flow as the computer feeds in calls one after the other.

Work fragmentation and having no control over work flow means that staff in such centres have high sick rates. Work organization leads to high sick rates. Medically this has been know for a long time. For example in the Civil Service a decades long study of illness has shown that lack of control over the work process is a major factor causing sickness.

Faced with the results of this medical research (called the Whitehall study) and the fact of high sick rates in the DSA call centre the PCS Union persuaded management to hire a world renowned team of work psychologists from the University of Sheffield. As a result of their investigation a trial of two new methods of working is being proposed. Under the first scheme workers will handle all types of calls, even if supposedly complex; for them there will be no work fragmentation and they will be allowed to take as long as it takes to sort out any problems. The other, more interesting idea, is that workers should self manage themselves and organize work between them; thus they will have no supervisors.

We are not claiming that this experiment will lead to the overthrowing of the division of labour. Adam Smith can rest easy in his grave. But if the experiment proves successful if does present a different way of organizing work. A counter model to call centre organization, possibly the hint of a better future world?