Scientific Management
Scientific management - management of a business, industry, or economy, according to principles of efficiency derived from experiments in methods of work and production, especially from time-and-motion studies.
One of the earliest of these theorists was Frederick Winslow Taylor. He started the Scientific Management movement, and he and his associates were the first people to study the work process scientifically. They studied how work was performed, and they looked at how this affected worker productivity. Taylor's philosophy focused on the belief that making people work as hard as they could was not as efficient as optimizing the way the work was done.
In 1909, Taylor published "The Principles of Scientific Management." In this, he proposed that by optimizing and simplifying jobs, productivity would increase. He also advanced the idea that workers and managers needed to cooperate with one another. This was very different from the way work was typically done in businesses beforehand. A factory manager at that time had very little contact with the workers, and he left them on their own to produce the necessary product. There was no standardization, and a worker's main motivation was often continued employment, so there was no incentive to work as quickly or as efficiently as possible.
Taylor believed that all workers were motivated by money, so he promoted the idea of "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." In other words, if a worker didn't achieve enough in a day, he didn't deserve to be paid as much as another worker who was highly productive.
With a background in mechanical engineering, Taylor was very interested in efficiency. While advancing his career at a U.S. steel manufacturer, he designed workplace experiments to determine optimal performance levels. In one, he experimented with shovel design until he had a design that would allow workers to shovel for several hours straight. With bricklayers, he experimented with the various motions required and developed an efficient way to lay bricks. And he applied the scientific method to study the optimal way to do any type of workplace task.
These "time and motion" studies also led Taylor to conclude that certain people could work more efficiently than others. These were the people whom managers should seek to hire where possible. Therefore, selecting the right people for the job was another important part of workplace efficiency. Taking what he learned from these workplace experiments, Taylor developed four principles of scientific management. These principles are also known simply as "Taylorism". As such, he found that by calculating the time needed for the various elements of a task, he could develop the "best" way to complete that task.
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Taylor's four principles of scientific management:
Replace working by "rule of thumb," or simple habit and common sense, and instead use the scientific method to study work and determine the most efficient way to perform specific tasks.
Rather than simply assign workers to just any job, match workers to their jobs based on capability and motivation, and train them to work at maximum efficiency.
Monitor worker performance, and provide instructions and supervision to ensure that they're using the most efficient ways of working.
Allocate the work between managers and workers so that the managers spend their time
planning and training, allowing the workers to perform their tasks efficiently.
Source: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_Taylor.htm
Scientific Management
Is the analysis and synthesis of workflow by managing the work being done in a way that puts emphasis on efficiency.
Taylor's experiment
The study was broken down into frames that highlight the next motion in the movement of the workers. This is in hope that by analyzing the movements of the workers taking logs up the ramp and loading the trailer that the concepts of Taylor’s studies would reveal themselves.
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The two workers one blue the other green are tasked with loading the trailer as fast as they could without slowing down. Through studying the two the green figure is a better worker, he is working fast while also using better technique to lift the wood. The green worker will be able to work for longer hours and for a longer period of his life.
If the blue worker used these finding would he change his work method? Fredrick would say that if he had an incentive to complete the work beyond just being a better worker. He would have to be shown that better workers get paid more or benefit more than him. Fredrick would increase the pay of better workers and lower the pay of poor workers to get better productivity out of them.
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Scientific Management
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The study was broken down into frames that highlight the next motion in the movement of the workers.
This is in hope that by analyzing the movements of the workers taking logs up the ramp and loading the trailer that the concepts of Taylor’s studies would reveal themselves.
The two workers one blue the other green are tasked with loading the trailer as fast as they could without slowing down.
Through studying the two the green figure is a better worker, he is working fast while also using better technique to lift the wood. The green worker will be able to work for longer hours and for a longer period of his life.
​
If the blue worker used these finding would he change his work method? Fredrick would say that if he had an incentive to complete the work beyond just being a better worker. He would have to be shown that better workers get paid more or benefit more than him. Fredrick would increase the pay of better workers and lower the pay of poor workers to get better productivity out of them.