The improvement of human work performance is not a new objective. For as long as people have been employed, managers have been trying to improve their performance. And the methods most managers use to try to improve employee performance are not new, either. The methods used today are essentially the same methods used more than a hundred years ago.

Industrial Roots

The roots of today’s methods for improving human performance date back to the early 1880s, when an American engineer, Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915), distinguished himself among factory foremen for his intelligence. Taylor studied the way workers naturally approached their tasks and designed ways to accomplish them more effectively and efficiently. The new work methods were then taught to all workers, creating dramatic improvements in their work performance and resulting in better pay and management relations for workers.

Taylor’s application of engineering principles to work and to the standardization of production and logistics labor enabled workers to improve their performance and employers to achieve steady increases in productivity. According to management scholar Peter Drucker, Taylor’s innovative contributions to the practice of consulting, time and motion studies, the study of best practices, the orientation and training of workers, and other methods for improving worker performance have sustained a four percent compounded increase in industrial productivity in the United States for more than one hundred years. Taylor’s “scientific management” principles ultimately became a foundation of the management curriculum of the Harvard Business School and other business schools.

Improving Human Performance Today

The improvement of all knowledge and service work is as vital to industries and governments today as the redesign of manual work was in the time of Frederick Taylor. Knowledge and service work now accounts for 80 percent of the work in most organizations. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, organizations remain challenged to increase the productivity of knowledge and service workers. Notwithstanding recent quality and reengineering initiatives, organizations continue to perform well below their potential.

The byline of an article by Drucker, “Management’s New Paradigms,” which appeared in the October 5, 1998, issue of Forbes, sums up the situation well. “In a fast changing world, what worked yesterday probably doesn’t work today. One of the fathers of modern management theory herein argues that much of what is now taught and believed about the practice of management is either wrong or seriously out of date.”

Because the effectiveness of knowledge and service work is based on human nature, the biological, psychological and social principles that govern performance today are substantially different from the engineering principles that prevailed when work was more machine-like than human. Training is limited to learning machine systems and machine-like behavior. Much greater is the need for education and development—instructional methods that provide knowledge and experience as context for decision-making, problem-solving, leadership, and other advanced capabilities.

Human performance improvement will one day become the responsibility of employees, and the job of managers will be to provide the necessary support. Though managers will be responsible for designing and maintaining work situations so that high levels of performance are the natural result, the complexity of the factors that determine the performance of knowledge and service workers requires their individual attention. To deal with the complexity involved, managers will need to rely on the support of a new breed of consultants, external or internal, whose job it will be to assist workers in the improvement of their performance and productivity. We call these knowledge-era practitioners humaneers.

pepitoneworldwide is routinely sought after to educate industry and government executives on the valuable knowledge and insights gained from the application of humaneering technology for improving human performance.

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