Entrepreneurs: Growing work for people

by MK Ward

Little is known about how work is designed by entrepreneurs, and scholars have begun to wonder about steady versus changing aspects of start-ups [1]. As entrepreneurs scale up their business, they need to make decisions about people’s roles, such as who should work together in a team and how specialized each role should be etc...

We had the opportunity to talk to one entrepreneur, Matt, about his thinking on work design. Matt started up, and now directs, a digital marketing agency with a focus on programmatic and dynamic ad creation.

Matt’s company has grown quite quickly from 4 people to over 20. An initial change was in Matt’s own work design, and that of Nick’s, the co-founder. In the early days when the company was small, both Matt and Nick were more hands-on, doing the technical work as well as sales. They worked very long hours, with little divide between work and non-work life, with high information processing demands, pressure for speed, and juggling many different tasks.

But now, specialised technical and creative teams have been put in place to handle the daily problem solving. This means Matt and Nick can focus their daily work on strategy and sales. There are also separate teams for advertising operations and accounts management.

Of course, whilst giving Matt and Nick time and energy for bigger picture work, the creation of new functional teams can create challenges for co-ordination. It is also important for teams to not only apply their technical and job specific expertise, but also to understand the strategy of the organisation so they can provide the best long-term solutions for the problems they are facing. All this makes the weekly meetings that Matt has introduced vitally important.

“Even though you might think a programmer doesn’t have any ideas outside of their tech area, we’ve had some fantastic thoughts and ideas (that we’ve passed) over to the creative team. So that’s the left brain and right brain thinking. If you share your experience and what you’ve done during the week, you get good feedback from all areas.”

As the company grows and it becomes impossible for everyone to come together as a whole group, other methods of integrating across the specialised teams and ensuring co-ordination will likely be needed. Conversations between people in different functional areas, sometimes called lateral integration or horizontal coordination [2], is particularly useful for scaling startups that compete on their promise of speed and agility. Quick turn-around times for clients requires fast problem solving and that means talking with co-workers who think differently from each other.

Another future challenge could arise from the emergent approach to work design. So far, the process of growing the company has been based on adding people when the demands of the work have noticeably exceeded the resources to do the work. But such a process, whilst lean and cost-effective, can be stressful for employees because their work load can get very high. High stress can become chronic, leading to burnout [3]. Too much stress can also damage the reputation of the startup as a good employer, increasing the difficulty of attracting talented staff when there are future growth spurts.

We expect that – when the company gets time to take a breath – it will be vitally important to take stock, and think strategically and systematically about how the work is designed. Start ups need to grow when there’s opportunity, and running lean is usually unavoidable, but good work design will be important for sustainability in the long term.

References

[1]DeSantola, A., & Gulati, R. (2017). Scaling: Organizing and Growth in Entrepreneurial Ventures. Academy of Management Annals, 11(2), 640–668. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2015.0125

[2]Torraco, R. J. (2005). Work Design Theory : A Review and Critique with Implications for Human Resource Development, 16(1).

[3]Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2001). The job demands-resources model of burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 499–512.

Theo - The Call Centre Employee

Call Centres: One of my KPIs was to take my breaks at the right time

Theo scored his job 6/10 ten being the most enjoyable job you can imagine).

by Daniela Andrei

Theo worked as a call centre operator at a major health insurance provider in Australia for almost two years. His job involved taking incoming calls from members about new and existing policies, as well as claims. When we interviewed Theo he had already left this job after being offered a different position in another company, but we used this opportunity to obtain another perspective on working in a call centre environment.

One of Theo’s greatest challenges in his role at the call centre was the lack of control (job autonomy) over his work. He felt his work to be very repetitive, with very strict rules around engagement with customers and how much time is spent on the phone, between calls or on breaks. The lack of autonomy became a greater challenge when combined with a lack of ability to have an input into his KPIs and how he might achieve those. For Theo, the call centre role was the first job where he had not had the opportunity to have input or autonomy over how he spends his time at work and how he achieved his targets. Moreover, Theo reported great amounts of emotional labour in his job, as one of the most important part of interacting with clients was maintaining a calm, patient tone, which he found to be very difficult when it was not matched by the customer.

“Probably the hardest part was that I didn’t have much control over what I was doing at work. I had to follow very strict rules about how to engage with the members, how much time I spent on the phone, how much time I had to spend in between phone calls, how much time I spent on my breaks. There was a lack of flexibility, and for me an additional challenge was that I didn’t have much of an input into what was required, my KPIs, what we needed to achieve and how I contributed to that.”

 “The workday was very repetitive. So, every day I would have the same schedule. I would know exactly the times I would have my breaks, to the minute. One of my KPIs was to take my breaks at the right time.”

“The hardest part was to work in a place where I didn’t get to go outside, or to walk around. I didn’t see daylight most because there weren’t any windows uncovered. So basically, all day we were under artificial lights.”

Patient Archive to Augment Human Work

A Technology That Augments Human Work Rather than Replaces It

by Georgia Hay and Florian Klonek

Technology all too often is designed to replace humans. But the best technology is that which actually helps humans to do their work better.

The Patient Archive is a great example of such technology.[1] It is used within the Western Australian Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP-WA) Expert Panel Meetings to help diagnose rare diseases – or to “solve the unsolvable”.

Patient Archive is a knowledge management platform that clinicians are encouraged to use to document patient-related information. Before the UDP-WA and Patient Archive was in place, clinicians had to go through literally hundreds of patient documents. In many cases, two clinicians treating the same patient would not even have access to the same patient-related information.

The new knowledge management platform collects this patient-related information from each clinician and everyone has instant access to it. As Gareth noted: “The information is all in one place” and “it can be accessed from secure computer in the WA health system”. Gareth also mentions that it makes the collection of clinical information about a child more efficient because information does not have to be duplicated.

The system also allows the team to compare phenotype descriptions with other rare cases worldwide. This looks for “the next case of”, that is it finds similar undiagnosed patients internationally, so together answers can then be found.

Importantly, Patient Archive does not just store this information – it organises and analyses it using sophisticated algorithms, significantly advancing  clinical practice and research in genetics, including the diagnosis of rare diseases. Since the Patient Archive is fed with text-based information, the internal algorithm organises the symptom descriptions and compares them with described criteria for thousands of documented diseases and provide the expert panel with suggestions.

Gareth’s perspective on how the technological change affects his work is very positive. He considers Patient Archive “as another part of the team – one that is free from cognitive bias”

is positive perspective is grounded in the way that technology has been implemented in the UDP. Since Patient Archive is only considered by Gareth as “one opinion out of many”, it does not enslave the clinicians to strictly follow its recommendations.

As a geneticist, Gareth has heard many times that technology will “take over the world” but he has never seen those predictions fulfilled. In contrast, his personal prediction is that “demand for, and the demands, of clinical geneticists will always increase” and that the increased use technology has rather caused the “rebirth of the generalist”. He added, “genes do not care what you trained in [they can affect many parts of the body] and patients probably care even less”).

Taken together, the Patient Archive is a good example of how technology can reduce cognitive demands of knowledge-intensive work and also how it enables (instead of enslaves) team coordination processes, supporting optimal delivery of patient care.

Reference

[1] The Patient Archive (http://www.patientarchive.org/#/home) was developed by the Phenomics Team at the Kinghorn Center of Clinical Genomics, Garvan Institute of Medical Research in collaboration with the Monarch Initiative, Genetic Services Western Australia and the Office of Population Health Genomics, Dept. of Health, Government of Western Australia.