On the Firstline with Lee Bryant: The Quantified Organization
Lee Bryant asks four critical questions
I have interviewed a few practitioners and visionaries this fall in a Microsoft-sponsored inquiry into the Firstline workforce, the workers who are
the first point of contact with customer, the first touch point with the supply chain, those who have first hand experience with products they build or the services they deliver.
These are the retail clerks, construction workers, and the teams on the factory floor. Employees who may spend their shifts standing, talking with customers in a shoe store, assembling an electric car, or turning wrenches on a building site.
Lee Bryant is an old friend, a colleague I first met in 2004, I think, and who leads Post*Shift, a consulting firm helping clients throught the complexities and channels of transformation into 21st-century business practice.
Other posts in the Firstline series include On the Firstline with Euan Semple, Why Frontline Employees Should Make All The Important Decisions, and Poking in the Shadows: What about ‘Hard Work’?.
— Read the full post at stoweboyd.com —
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THE PROVOCATION
Stowe Boyd: We live and work in an accelerating, interconnected, and hyper-competitive world, where it’s increasingly hard to know what’s over the horizon, and where innovation, agility, and vision are more essential than ever. For business leadership this means it’s essential to develop and communicate a clear understanding of the company’s trajectory in the world as the basis for concerted action, moving from the boardroom and C suite across the company, and out to the firstline workforce: those who are the first point of contact with customer, the first touch point with the supply chain, those who have first hand experience with products they build or the services they deliver. How can leadership make that vision an organizing force, bringing the firstline into greater alignment with the company as a whole, and to help the firstline workforce to adapt to a new, rapidly changing business economy?
Companies must become more agile than ever before to respond to constantly changing business realities, and that requires increased innovation not only at headquarters, but out at the firstline, where the company meets its customers, competitors, and greatest challenges. So the firstline workforce must be able and empowered to experiment, to innovate, try out new ideas, and to learn from those attempts to better fit the changing marketplace. What are the barriers that might block this from happening?
The key to success, even in this sped-up economy, is still the productivity of the workforce. Getting more with less and achieving better outcomes means a workforce more connected and more efficient than ever before, maximizing everyone’s contributions. This requires a digital transformation of the business, one that reaches to all operations of the business. How will the transformed firstline workforce — in manufacturing, retail, hospitality, construction, healthcare and other industries — operate in the near future, and what role will technology play in that transformation?
The shift to greater agility and efficiency requires a rethinking of the role of the firstline workforce, even as we rethink the business as a whole, to better engage and empower them. Their insights about what’s going on at the core of the business are often the best, and can be critical to company-wide innovation and improvement. What changes must be made to get the firstline workforce more engaged, to gain higher customer satisfaction, business performance, and workforce retention?
THE INTERVIEW
Lee Bryant: There are lots of angles and aspects to this, but for me, some of the questions that need addressing include the following questions:
1. How to mitigate the inefficiency of hierarchical communication and work coordination for firstline workers who need to work at customer speed, not corporate speed. The model they need is closer to a mesh network that connects them as peers than a centralised network that sees them as servants of the centre.
SB: I recently read some research that supports this. Microsoft researchers Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri investigated the communications patterns of Mechanical Turk workers (as reported by Emily Anthes in The shape of work to come). They discovered that the concept many have of these gig workers laboring as soloists has to be reconsidered. They found that there was an extensive social network of MT workers communicating and collaborating. And those who had connections to at least one other worker on the platform were more likely to gain ‘master’ status, discover new work more quickly, and had higher approval ratings. As Gray said, ‘they need each other’.
I wager that the same is true for firstline workers. While their work may be formally structured as rote processes without great attention to the communications between firstline workers–and often as a work list of independent tasks–your mesh network grows organically in the face of actual work.
LB: Yes, I agree. This also mirrors emergent communication and collaboration among Uber drivers, who share tips on how to operate and also sometimes coordinate availability to maximise surge pricing. When the user case is useful enough, social networks seem to emerge almost naturally. So, whilst companies may think work happens within their formal hierarchical chains of command, the reality is that this is mitigated by a lot of peer to peer collaboration that is happening laterally.
— Read the full post at stoweboyd.com —
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The Firstline series is sponsored by Microsoft, but the opinions expressed are those of the individuals involved, and not Microsoft.
