I am helping a company streamline its inventory management system. It is a relatively small size company. Even after two weeks, I haven't yet received the Purchase Order. Though the work has started, their account department will not process my advance till the PO is issued. Such a bureaucratic mess exists in every company. It is an enterprise-wide phenomenon. It impacts every possible area of business.
The term bureaucracy means “rule by desks or offices,” a definition that highlights the often impersonal character of bureaucracies.
I am not against bureaucracy. Bureaucracy helped us organize work, standardize and optimize tasks, monitor progress. It has served its purpose and now needs to be ended. It is based on a fundamental paradigm that only a few people are capable of envisioning, planning, managing, and controlling. The principles of hierarchy, job specialization, division of labor, formal rules, procedures were born from this paradigm. These soon became practices and essentially converted all the employees into automatons.
Bureaucracy is so deep-rooted in our organization that all the jobs even today are organized top-down. I randomly picked up the JD of an accountant. Here is what it says:
Preparing accounts and tax returns. Monitoring spending and budgets. Auditing and analyzing financial performance. Compiling and presenting financial and budget reports. Ensure that financial statements and records comply with laws and regulations.
Aren't most of these activities easy to automate?
The way we design work is making it easy to replace people with machines and algorithms. How many JDs need people to define their own role, manage their own work without supervision, work in a team, be creative, solve problems, generate business ideas, take risks?
If our employees can make independent decisions of buying a house and a car, decide their kid's careers, choose their life partners, manage their finances, what makes us believe that they are incapable of making decisions that have an insignificant impact as compared to the decisions they make in their personal life? Various studies have confirmed that the combined intelligence of masses trounces that of a single person. However, the bureaucracy just does not let such an enterprise-wide collaboration happen.
So, first, eliminate bureaucracy from the organization. Reorganize work in a way that lets people use their heart, soul, brain, and body. Open up collaboration and communication channels across the organization. Allow the employees to be more enterprising and creative.
The positive virtues of humanism are freedom to choose, freedom to express, freedom to experience new things, connect with others, learn, and grow. Are our organizations allowing people to be humans?
Subodh
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