As a flex-style manager reacting to constantly changing situations, your on-thespot
decisions and actions are going to be far better if you, too, can draw on sound
principles of management theory and the accumulated experience of successful managers.
In this article we introduce you to those principles and theories that can help
you to work out your own answers as a supervisor in a hotel or foodservice setting.
They can provide a background of knowledge, thoughts, and ideas that will give you
confidence and a sense of direction as you meet and solve the same problems that
other managers before you have met and solved.
Theories of People Management
The development of management as an organized body of knowledge and theory is
a product of the last hundred years. It was an inevitable outgrowth of the Industrial
Revolution and the appearance of large enterprises needing skilled managers and new
methods of running a business.
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
One of the earliest developments affecting the management of people was the scientific
management movement appearing around 1900 and stemming from the work
of Frederick Taylor. Taylor’s goal was to increase productivity in factories by applying
a scientific approach to human performance on the job. Using carefully developed
time-and-motion studies, he analyzed each element of each production task and by
eliminating all wasted motions, arrived at the ‘‘one best way’’ to perform the task. In
the same way he established a ‘‘fair day’s work,’’ which was the amount of work a
competent worker could do in one workday using the one best way.
The system Taylor developed had four essential features:
1. Standardization of work procedures, tools, and conditions of work through design
of work methods by specialists
2. Careful selection of competent people, thorough training in the prescribed methods,
and elimination of those who could not or would not conform
3. Complete and constant overseeing of the work, with total obedience from the
workers
4. Incentive pay for meeting the fair day’s work standard—the worker’s share of the
increased productivity
Taylor believed that his system would revolutionize labor–management relations
and would produce ‘‘intimate, friendly cooperation between management and men’’
because both would benefit from increased productivity. Instead, his methods caused
a great deal of strife between labor and management. Workers who once planned
much of their own work and carried it out with a craftsman’s pride were now forced
into monotonous and repetitive tasks performed in complete obedience to others.
Taylor believed that higher wages—‘‘what they want most’’—would make up for
having to produce more and losing their say about how they did their work. But his
own workers, with whom he was very friendly, did everything they could to make his
system fail, including breaking their machines. The craft unions of that day fought
Taylor’s system bitterly, and relations between management and labor deteriorated.
Productivity, however, increased by leaps and bounds, since fewer workers could do
more work.
Another innovator, Frank Gilbreth, carried forward the search for the one best
way of performing tasks, or work simplification. Using ingenious time-and-motion
study techniques, he developed ways of simplifying tasks that often doubled or tripled
what a worker could do. His methods and principles had a great impact in foodservice
kitchens, where work simplification techniques have been explored extensively and
widely adopted.
Taylor’s innovations began a revolution in management’s approach to production.
His theories and methods were widely adopted (although the idea that the worker
should share in the benefits of increased productivity seldom went along with the
rest of the system). A whole new field of industrial engineering developed in which
efficiency experts took over the planning of the work. In this process the workers
came to be regarded as just another element of the production process, often an
adjunct to the machine. Their job was to follow the rules, and the supervisors saw
to it that they did, and this became the prevailing philosophy of people management.
Everything is systematized, and the worker is simply taught to run the machines,
follow the rules, and speak given phrases. When the bell rings, the worker turns the
hamburgers on the grill. To make a pancake, the worker hits the batter dispenser one
time. There is no room for deviation.
Such standardization has many benefits to the enterprise. It maintains product
consistency from one unit to the next. It allows the use of unskilled labor and makes
training quick, simple, and inexpensive. It is well suited to short-term workers on
their first jobs. But such complete standardization may not work so well in other
settings or for other types of workers. When there is no room for deviation, there is
no opportunity for originality, no relief from monotony. Enterprises less completely
geared to high turnover may have problems with training and morale. You can also see scientific management at work in the standardized recipe, the
standardized greeting, the standardized hotel registration procedures, and the standardized
making of a hospital bed. But scientific management as a whole is practiced
in restaurants and hotels far less than it could be. We have the methods and techniques,
but we seldom use them. We may have standardized recipes, but except in
baking, many cooks never look at them. We may standardize procedures, but we
seldom enforce them. We hire in panic and in crisis; we take the first warm body
that presents itself and put it to work. We use the magic apron training method: We
give the new employee an apron and say ‘‘Go.’’ We assume that anyone knows how
to do some of our entry-level jobs. We hang on to inefficient workers because we are
afraid that the next ones we hire will be even worse. As for overseeing their work,
who has time to do that?
Probably the very nature of the hotel and food businesses makes them unsuitable
for totally scientific management. Still, there are important elements of the method
that can be used to increase productivity, achieve consistent results, make customers
happy and patients well, increase profit, and make a manager’s life much easier, all
without making workers into human machines.