McKinsey Commentary: Doling out the workload

Doling out the workload: How integrating automation for knowledge workers can increase productivity

Your employees work a typical 40-60 hour workweek and they’re the ones that make the company tick. They knowledgeably take the ideas and make them reality. You want them to pound out the grunt-work quickly to translate work into revenue. There are two schools of thought to provide employees the means to production: free information and assigned tasks. It’s a matter of how long you want the leash to be in order to get an assigned task completed. Automated systems can bring the desired result, but often alienate workers by giving them a task to complete without collaboration. It’s just man and machine. So how can you merge technologically advanced automation with classic free information to maximize output and therefore revenue? McKinsey’s “Rethinking Knowledge work: A Strategic Approach” provides a solid foundation for these “knowledge workers”, who act and communicate with specified knowledge to make your company what it is.

• Executives who don’t look for opportunities to harness the power of structure probably won’t get the most from knowledge workers.
• The presumption is that knowledge workers, as experts, know what information is available and can search for and manage it themselves without using these information tools for things other than work. Of course, these assumptions may sometimes be incorrect.
• Systems to organize this knowledge can help productivity.
• The downside of these technologies is negative reactions by the workers who use them, but workers can feel they are “chained to their desks”
• The key issue here is to decide which aspects of the relevant process could benefit from more structured technologies and processes and which should be left largely untouched by them.
• Another way of smoothing the path to structure is letting knowledge workers use familiar, typically free-access tools when they interact with a structured system.
• It’s time to think about how to make them more productive by imposing a bit more structure. This combination of technology and structure, along with a bit of managerial discretion in applying them to knowledge work, may well produce a revolution in the jobs that cost and matter the most to contemporary organizations.

Great leaders know how to get the most out of their workers while making them feel like their work is vitally important and their input is being heard. If you need to automate processes, make sure it’s done in a way that doesn’t make workers feel obsolete, but rather that their input within the automation is key to success.