THE MAN BEHIND THE MACHINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 416, 13 June 1947, Page 14

THE MAN BEHIND THE MACHINE

Psychology and the Production Problem

F a man has a reasonably wellpaid job in a factory and there is little risk that he will lose it (or, if he does, that he will be unable to find another equally good), what are the incentives most likely to persuade him to work harder and increase production, or even to keep him working at his normal rate of- output? That is a question which is becoming increasingly important in in- | dustry. Employers as well as worker's | are showing more and more interest in | efforts to find. an answer and, since the / | problem directly involves the human | factor-the man behind the machinethey are looking to the psychologists to help them. At the recent congress of the Royal | Society of New Zealand, a paper deal- | ing .with industrial incentives and the will to work was presented by L, S. Hearnshaw, director of the industrial psychology division of the Department | of Scientific and Industrial Research, and senior lecturer in psychology at Victoria University College. Since the congress it has been announced that Mr. Hearnshaw has accepted a chair of Psy- | chology at the University of Liverpool and will be leaving New Zealand about | the end of September. The Listener took the opportunity of inviting him to discuss with us some of the points raised in his paper, aswell as the progress made by. industrial psychology during the five years in which he has _ been officially associated with the work in New Zealand. Mr. Hearnshaw agrees that there has been progress, but thinks that only the surface has been scratched in this country. "The most noticeable thing in psychology now is not so much the discovery of new knowledge as the application of knowledge already existing to a variety of problems. Previoysly it was mostly academic knowledge, existing inside the walls of universities, but during the war it has been taken outside and applied in many directions. There is a great. demand for psychologists now; there aren’t enough to do the work. In the last four or five years I have noticed an awakening of interest in problems of management and labour, whereas before when you talked about such problems and about industrial psychology you would have difficulty in making yourself understood. However, I have had all the co-operation I have needed for my work with the Department." "Does that include the co-operation of industrial executives-the heads of firms, managers of factories, and so on? ‘They don’t think you are just a nuisance?" we asked. Managers Train Too’ | "Well, perhaps some do, but most don’t. Certainly, when we first began giving lectures about industria] fatigue, some of them thought we would just put the idea of fatigue into the workers’ minds and that they would all start drooping over their jobs. But that phase didn’t last. Now the managers have their -training-centre for learning the technique

of management-the Institute of Indue trial Management-with headquarters in Wellington, branches in other centres, and a large membership." We asked Mr. Hearnshaw what he thought about the "time and motion" technique for cutting out unnecessary movement by workers in industrial processes, and ‘so increasing efficiency and speeding up production. "That technique can reduce fatigue a little among workers," he replied. "But carried out narrowly, these efficiency ideas can be dangerous and cause trouble by increasing monotony. All the same, if a worker is repeating the same movement hundreds of times a day, it is often useful to save unnecessary effort. For instance, there was a case in a New Zealand biscuit factory where they had the tins sitting up on top of the bench while they were being filled. It was possible for us to save quite a lot of time and effort by suggesting that the tins should be sunk to the level of the pack-ing-bench. But nobody has ever quite decided whether that sort of thing is psychology or not." We instanced a device we had noticed in a magazine, for attaching to a typewriter to register the number of tapssome‘hing like 45,000 a day gn an average -given to her machine by the typist. It clocked results in the manner of a car’s mileage-meter. Would Mr. Hearnshaw approve of that sort of thing, or did it make the worker too much of an automaton? "That rather depends on the nature of the work to be done. There are some jobs so monotonous that merely to have some kind of measure such as you mention gives the worker an interest and in itself introduces an incentive-that might be so if, for example, a girl had to type hundreds of addresses every day. On the other hand, a nervous type of individual might be badly affected. The trouble 1s that employers often tend to introduce new ideas like that without sufficient forethought; if the thing is done indiscreetly, nervous tension and worry among employees may be caused. Nothing of that sort should be introduced without a careful check on the human reactions to change. Experts need to be constantly watching the human factor in industry," ; : "Should that supervision be done by an outside authority like the State, or by someone on the staff of the firm?" Worker Participation "That’s a difficult question to answer, because we’ve had no real experience of its being done except by welfare workers and experts employed by firms. But whoever does it, the most important thing in any production drive is consideration of the individual worker. What is needed to produce results now fs not increased mechanisation, but more attention to the human background of industry. "It is true that workers are, in effect, too often just parts of a machine," continued Mr. Hearnshaw. "They have no (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) real sense of belonging to the firm. They are given little information about the nature and importance of the work they are doing in relation to the finished article; too often they have no appreciation of the technical and administrative problems involved. In such circumstances it is hard to expect them to co-operate fully." "You think then that employers should learn the lesson that Montgomery learnt during the war, and should take their workers as much into their confidence as Montgomery took his officers?" "Exactly. In industry there are so many restrictions on personal freedom that they are apt to cause annoyance if the workers don’t understand the reasons for them. When the shoe begins to ‘pinch one wents to know why." "Would you say that Government departments are any better in this respect than private employers?" "Frankly, I doubt if there is any difference between management techniques under State enterprise and private enterprise. That is because these problems are independent of politics alto-gether-they are human problems. But the risks of opening the door and taking the workers into the management’s confidence are not nearly so great as is often imagined; it is frequently nothing more than habit or tradition which keeps the door closed. I know of one New Zealand factory in which the manager gives his employees almost a# much information as he gives his board of directors-and that factory has gone on from success te success. "The monetary incentive is very powerful, of course, but it is not the basic incentive," continued Mr. Hearnshaw. "In the final analysis, people work because it is a necessary and useful human activity. In that factory I mentioned the men take a real pride in their work because they know all about it-all about the technical processes and the administrative problems involved." "Do the unions view with favour the job you have been doing in industrial psychology?" "Yes. I doubt very much whether the purely destructive type of unionism can ever take root in a firm where there are good industrial relationships between workers and management. Contrary perhaps to general belief, the majority of union secretaries are extremely reasonable human beings: the aggressive type

of unionism develops mainly when conditions among the workers are unsatisfactory. And I think it should be added that the problems of. management are much the same everywhere; they apply not merely to industry but to Government departments, to local bodies, hospitals, to the Army, and so on. You've got to adapt your methods of treatment to particular local circumstances, but the problems themselves are basically no different. The Leisure Incentive "It is when the incentives creating the will to work become weak that industry tends to fall back on negative and disciplinary incentives: the stronger the positive incentives, the less need there is for the others. One incentive to which more attention might be paid is that of leisure. I don’t know of any New Zealand firm using the leisure incentiveallowing workers to leave the factory as soon as they have finished their . jobs satisfactorily. But at least one English factory has had good results with it; the quota of output has been exceeded, with no bad effect on quality. After all, many people these days seem to be just as keen on earning leisure as on earning more money; you see that frequently in the reluctance to accept overtime work. What the average person wants is personal freedom, and for that leisure time is needed as much as money." "But the trouble with modern leisure in many cases is that it has been organised in such a way that you need company before you can enjoy it-mightn’t that be a handicap to such a scheme?" we asked. "Might not a worker be just as pleased to go on working as to have a few hours off by himself in the afternoon?" "Yes, I’'admit there are a lot of difficulties in the way: of organising the use of the .leisure incentive. But it should be made possible for a worker to accumulate rewards of leisure, so that after he had worked well for a period he could take a day or two off, or add the extra time to his annual holiday." Mr. Hearnshaw said that a very noticeable feature of New Zealand industry compared with English industry was the mobility of labour: the "turnover" of workers between firms and between different parts of the country was very much greater hete. In England, workers would often spend the whole of their lives in the one firm and in the one place; whereas in many New Zealand | firms it was quite exceptional to find people who had spent more than five. years in the same job. There were, on the other hand, firms in which only about 25 per cent of the people employed at. the beginning of a year were still there at the end of it; and at the end of two years there might be only 10 per cent. Speaking of the management side of industry, Mr. Hearnshaw said his impression was that managers in New Zealand factories were too busy, were too much tied up with routine, to take as much interest as they ‘should in affairs outside their immediate jobs. Mr. Hearnshaw, who is an Englishman, has been in New Zealand for nine years. He "got into industrial psychology," as he put it, during the war, but is mostly interested in the University side of psychology. However, Liverpool, where he is going, is a fairly large industrial centre and there is, he told us, no good training-centre for industrial psychologists in England at present. So it seems unlikely that his new work will be purely academic.