On reflection, there are perhaps three major areas of interest in these posts, the community, the political voice and how we value people. I circle around trying to hone in on the core issues but it all changes depending on where you start from and which direction you look in. Bear with me. My current pre-occupation is with how we value people. Looking back at Tax, Salaries & Reward, Raising Revenue, That Extra Mile, even Unemployed, I have touched on several interrelated aspects. Now it is time to dig a little deeper.
There are no absolutes controlling this world. The financial systems we have served their purposes for their time, those systems that worked well, for us, carry us forward. But they are not immutable. They may not even be the best or may have undesirable consequences. That they work is not sufficient reason to stand off and not look at them and ask, is there a better way? We are at the cusp of a new era, IT is changing every parameter of the society we used to know. The future is unmapped, beyond our ken but we do have tools in our hand that we can choose to use to help shift it one way or another. My other posts mentioned at the start gives some indications. Time for another.
The cost of labour. As an accounting unit it is simple to define and therefore simple to totalise, build that into the equation and then calculate your profit or loss. Reduce labour costs, increase profit. Ergo, simple. Except of course life is not simple and the implications and consequences of reducing labour costs are far from simple and have radical society wide impact. Yet if you cannot produce a profit, you cannot continue to produce. Without 'production' there is no call for labour. But life is not simple. We do have to find another way of looking at labour other than just as a cost.
I have touched on it before. Human interactions are best carried out between humans, machine or automated processes just cannot cope with the complexity that a human persons life introduces into the proceedings. Deskilling is a current economic vogue. Break complicated task down into simpler routines, write out the controlling parameters and then teach junior grade staff to perform these simpler routines. Job done and money saved. If only. As an illustration a NHS Staff Nurse when they sit by the bedside of a patient are monitoring the patient for health signs, for verbal indications of well-being and sensory evaluating that all things are in place. Their training but most of all their experience enable them carry out this complex appraisal quickly before passing onto the next patient. Not so the ward assistant charged with serving food, or changing bedclothes, issuing medicines or washing the patient. Simple narrowly focussed tasks that tick the task boxes but misses that experienced overview. How is the Staff Nurse trapped in the office appraising reports of task completed by junior staff ever going to get the time to overview the patient behind these individuals tasks done? The junior staff do not have the training nor experience to understand when something is wrong that can be changed. The boxes are ticked but we are left in a bad place. How does that feel when you complete an automated call process? Wouldn't a voice call to an operator have been faster, more efficient and most of all felt a better experience. Even granting a low calibre operator!
We have to change the way people are valued in the work place. The cost of labour is not the be and end all. Some companies are beginning to respond to this issue, reverting back to human intervention. A "I see what you say" defuses the potential for conflict but unless to drives on to a resolution is only a feel good panacea. The underlying satisfaction surveys have too get a lot smarter. Is not how good we rate the experience but the ease and efficiency by which the problem is resolved that should count. Let us reward problem identification and resolution.
A machine can outperform a tennis player in predetermined shots but can never be a match for the instant anticipation, response and calculated unplayable reply in reaction to a random challenging serve or return. The human mind is fine tuned to compute all those thousands of measurements calculations and positional changes required, unmatched by any foreseeable machine. Let us reward the learnt and adaptable exercise of fine motor controls in novel situations.
We are surrounded and swamped with examples of creative thinking. Machines can be brilliant at producing and searching for viable permutations from selected factors and we are beginning to discover techniques where by 'machine' can learn to optimise a response to a predetermined problem. We humans have been doing it for thousands of years, seeing a problem and coming up with a solution that has no precedent and is not dependant on the starting out position. Lets us reward the outcome of creative thinking.
Today a man was celebrated because his last expression of anger was more than twentyfive years ago, all put down to the benefits of meditation. Whatever route taken some people are able to offer a calming restorative good humoured response to others dealing with life's problems. Lets us reward those that help us back to good humour.
Lets us reward all those intrinsically human attributes that enrich our lives together, based not on the hours of time spent but on the outcomes. Outcomes that contribute to all our better well-beings. Rewards for a job well-done and not for the time spent doing it well or otherwise. Job well-done measured by the human satisfaction with the outcome and not some abstract rule or measure or specification of acceptability. We must relearn how to use humans to their achieve their optimum and then reward them proportionately for those achievements. Let machines do the donkey work they are best suited to. In the end only a human can finally decide whether that fact, trawled from zillions of possibles, is actually relevant to the question in hand.
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