The Mouse Overlord

It's a world of laughter,
A world of tears.
A world of hope -
And a world of fears . . .

I had time this moring to read an article and give it thought, and have come to the conlcusion that someone at Disney has lost their mind. 

In the basements of the Disneyland and Paradise Pier hotels in Anaheim, big flat-screen monitors hang from the walls in rooms where uniformed crews do laundry. The monitors are like scoreboards, with employees' work speeds compared to one another. Workers are listed by name, so their colleagues can see who is quickest at loading pillow cases, sheets and other items into a laundry machine.

Employees in the Anaheim hotels are required to key in their ID when they arrive, and from then on, their production speed is displayed for all to see. For instance, the monitor might show that S. Lopez is working at an efficiency rate of 37% of expected production. The screen displays the names of several coworkers at once, with "efficiency" numbers in green for those near or above 100% of the expected pace, and red numbers for those who aren't as fast.

According to Barrera, the whip has led to a sort of competition among workers, some of whom have tried to race to the head of the pack. But that has led to dissension and made other employees worry that a reasonable pace won't be enough to keep the boss happy. Barrera and Beatriz Topete, an official with Unite Here Local 11, said employees have been known to skip bathroom breaks out of fear that their production will fall and managers will demand an explanation. They say they felt bad for a pregnant employee who had trouble keeping up.

Pillow cases  Really?!  I am all for monitoring productivity in the workplace.  The trick has always been to find what is the proper benchmark and how do we go about measuring it.  I have worked as an IT consultant and as an attorney, so I am very familiar with the practice of using billable hours in those fields as a means of determining how "well" an employee is working.  I use the term "well" as a general sense since I have seen where billable hours is a number that does not always correlate with the quality of a job.  Likewise, I have seen cases where the circumstances of a case are such that extra time is needed for a commonplace task - such as when the client is difficult - but partners say "We can't bill that much!" and cut the hours, thereby eliminating it as a tool to measure productivity.

But here I think Disney grossly misses the mark in what it has implemented.  I would think the last thing a company wants is for its employees to be "clock watchers" - or, in this case, "board watchers" - when the means of measuring productivity could actually harm productivity.  If I am afraid of my name showing up in red on the board, I will be checking more than working at my tasks.

And is this accurate?  We have all had "bad days" when conditions have us operating at less than peak.  A minor cold, a worry about a child home sick, a broken off relationship.  What happens if, in this case, I am having a "red" day?  Does it matter?  Or does an overall trend really show how productive a worker I am?

The article does not describe how the worker's "rate" is entered into the system behind the scoreboard.  Is there someone entering the number of pillow cases and sheets stuffed into a laundry machine?  That allows for a margin of error if the person entering the data makes a mistake.  Is there some sort of scanner that tallies the number of sheets and pillowcases going in?  I suppose in order for that to be accurate, a worker would have to separately load each pillow case and likely would hesitate to make sure the pillocase got recognized, slowing them down.

I am also curious to know how the proper "rate" or producivity is set.  I wonder if the workers really go at it, and exceed the 100% - is a new and higher rate set, based on that?  That is not unlike what was seen in the old Soviet Union, where "giving it 110%" was rewarded by even higher expectations and failure to reach that meant punishment.  So the workers game the system.  For example, a shoe factory in Minsk might have a quota of 10,000 shoes produced each month.  And 10,000 were produced - all size 8 and for the left foot.  If 10,000 pillow cases at Disney are to be washed, who is to say that a worker does not overlaod a machine in an effort to keep the numbers high, resulting in 10,000 badly washed pillowcases.

There is no one statistic that can say the best is achieved.  Yes, raw numbers like this count but it also has to be weighed in consideration of other things.  For example, what is the customer satisfaction - are there complaints about a lack of bedding or its quality?  Has housekeeping been hampered by the laundry facilities?  How old are the laundry machines?  How old are the pillowcases? 

And what about the people actually doing the work?  I have always hated when supervisors use a status meeting to unload on a team member - it's undignified, it's degrading, and it rarely has the desired effect of making the person change their course.  In fact, more often than not, it causes further deterioration of the quality of their work.  What is more effective is more timely and private feedback, where a manager takes someone aside and says, "I notice x, y, and z, and things are slipping - let's talek about it.  Is there something you think can be done to help you in your work?"  Yes, it means the manager actually has to have skills in management, but that's how good business is done. 

No one needs their "dirty laundry" - pun intended - aired to their coworkers.  And just because people are doing manual labor does not mean they should be measured as machines.