Changing work organisation and skill requirements

How work is organised is an important factor in determining what skills workers need to do their jobs. It is common to think therefore that, with today’s emphasis on teamwork, employees must be multi-skilled and able to work collaboratively and flexibly, unfettered by traditional hierarchical structures and rigid task separation.

This research, part of a larger body of work addressing issues on changing work and skill needs in Australia, investigated the extent to which the contemporary workplace has changed. It compared practices in several industries (call centres, hospitals, manufacturing plants and mining operations) with a model of high performance, to see how they were faring and their degree of success in meeting the complex demands of industry. It also considered whether employees needed new sets of skills and the role the vocational education and training (VET) should adopt in providing these skills.

Key messages

• Australian organisations have experimented with elements of the high-performance model, including teamwork, decentralisation of authority, increased knowledge-sharing, flexibility in job content, pay for performance, strict recruitment practices, and additional training provision. However:
• • there are few examples of organisations that have sustained teamwork systems. Instead, teamwork has either declined or been used primarily to ensure the social integration of workers or induct them into organisational cultures.
  • none of these practices has been used consistently to produce permanent changes in how work is organised, nor to produce a demand for significant new skills (for example, communication skills) among employees.
    
    
• Cost-cutting and cost containment have often been the motivation for reorganising work practices. While these have resulted in multi-skilling, such changes are unintended and normally not resourced. They run the risk of high degrees of work intensification and people quitting.

• Nevertheless, employees do need to be able to negotiate workplace changes by developing skills in areas such as cooperation and negotiation, as well as greater abilities in administrative, supervisory and even management skills.
• While it would be unwise of the VET system to design future training on the assumption that high-performance practices will become widespread, VET providers do need to remain sensitive to these changes in work organisation among their clients, and to the skills development they can offer employees needing to cope with them.

For a synthesis of the entire program of work conducted by the National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, and the Centre for Post-compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Melbourne see A well-skilled future by Sue Richardson and Richard Teese.

Tom Karmel
Managing Director, NCVER

This report is a component of a research program entitled A well-skilled future: Tailoring VET to the emerging labour market. This research program examines the evolving labour market and changing work organisation and management in the context of the vocational education and training (VET) sector and its role in the development of the appropriate levels, types and quantities of skills required to satisfy the future demands of Australian industry. The research reports have been produced by researchers from the National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, and the Centre for Post-compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning of the University of Melbourne.

Many work organisation analysts have identified a sea change in how people work together, and the consequences for the skills they need. In Australia and similar societies it is often argued that such factors as increased global competition, rapidly changing consumer markets, and the expansion of the service sector all require much more flexible work practices. These in turn require new constellations of skills amongst employees. Put more concretely, the argument is that work has become more and more organised and displays many of the following features:

• the use of team-based work systems, requiring cooperation and multi-skilling amongst team members, rather than hierarchical and rigid task separation

• the decentralisation of authority and decision-making

• the sharing of knowledge between employees to facilitate efficient work and rapid response to changing market demands

• workers taking greater responsibility for their own work

• workers moving freely between tasks as required, rather than being bound by occupational divisions.

Changes such as these would normally be expected to increase requirements that employees have team-working skills, such as the ability to communicate effectively and to cooperate, as well the capacity to acquire new skills readily.

The aims of this project were:

• to assess the evidence that there has been a sea change in work organisation in Australia, along the lines described above

• to understand the implications of any such changes for vocational education and training (VET).

To achieve these aims we collated and analysed evidence contained in published (and some unpublished) case studies of Australian work reorganisation in the past decade. The cases do not provide an exhaustive database for assessing the actual course of organisational change, since their coverage by industry and types of work is somewhat patchy. However, they are diverse enough to allow new insights into the course of change in Australia. The cases span a range of industries and geographical spaces: call centres, hospitals, and manufacturing plants in the major urban centres and mining operations in remote areas across several states. Some are focused on a single industry, others compare several sectors, and still others focus on a major occupation or group of workers (for example, nurses). The cases have a common interest in describing the nature of work in contemporary Australia. Our aim was to synthesise their major conclusions, draw out the emergent themes, and assess the implications for skills utilisation and the demand for VET.

Reorganisation for high performance: Australian evidence

The idealised ‘high performance’ workplace, a model of work organisation designed to improve output and empower workers and which gained currency from the 1990s, exerts a strong influence in consideration of future skill needs and the orientation of VET policy. Evidence from Australian cases indicates widespread experimentation with teamwork in industry. Teams have been introduced to negotiate technological change (and associated staffing changes), to explore options for productivity improvement, and to improve information exchange. They have also been established in some cases for cultural reasons, for example, to improve sociability among individuals doing mostly repetitive and impersonal tasks.

The measure of successful teamwork arrangements is whether the teams survive past an initial period of enthusiasm and support. The more ambitious teams appear not to have met this test. In manufacturing, teams restricted to single organisational sections were more likely to survive than those spanning multiple functions and initiating job rotation schemes. In call centres, on the other hand, team-based working arrangements succeed because they benefit both the floor workers (who receive social support) and managers (who receive advice about improving work processes), while leaving intact the accepted and highly individualistic nature of the work itself.

Beyond these teamwork initiatives and experiments, evidence about the implementation of other aspects of the high-performance paradigm is very patchy for Australia. This is not to suggest that success stories do not exist, only that written reports of this achievement cannot be readily found in academic or industry journals, or through direct contact with key research institutions that are likely to have conducted the relevant study. We argue that, at this point, the high-performance mode of work remains peripheral to mainstream trends in Australian work reorganisation over the past decade.

Cost reduction and its unplanned consequences

There is more substantial case study material documenting a different kind of workplace change in Australia. Here the motive for reorganisation is not a quest for quality improvement or better employee morale, but a drive to reduce operating costs. The principal routes to this form of change have been downsizing and the increasing use of ‘non-standard’ forms of employment such as casual and agency staff.

Three key features define this strategy.

• An emphasis on cost reduction or restoration of profitability generally leads to short-run gains which can be achieved only at the risk of more distant and often unforeseeable costs of other kinds. Examples from the healthcare sector include higher rates of turnover among staff who survive initial downsizing efforts and the engagement of agency workers lacking role-specific skills to meet immediate labour demands. ‘Flexible’ staffing arrangements are most successful where they draw on a stable local supply of potential recruits to casual jobs.

• Paradoxically, some of the results of the cost-driven ‘low road’ to workplace change are similar to the outcomes of the high-performance approach. Both may lead, for instance, to employees taking on a broader range of tasks, more on-the-job learning, fewer occupational boundaries, and more decentralised authority structures.

• The crucial difference is that, in the low-cost model, a widening of job responsibilities comes without additional resources and support. Workers who remain with their organisation after downsizing or ‘rationalisation’ are expected to fill the void left by those who have departed. In general, the ‘survivors’ face work intensification (including unpaid overtime) and are more likely to quit (a scenario that high-performance workplaces expressly try to avoid).

New or different skill requirements?

There is little evidence that major changes in skill requirements are arising from any actual moves towards ‘high performance’ work practices in Australia. Nevertheless, the increasing use of some limited forms of teamwork probably increases the value of skills in communication and cooperation. It does appear that these changes often make the most of workers’ existing abilities, which have been previously unused, rather than requiring that they develop new skills.

On the other hand, case studies suggest that it is the unplanned consequences of cost-reduction strategies and not the process of carrying out planned work reorganisation that most affects employee skill requirements. In particular, cost-reduction strategies often involve increasing the proportion of contingent workers in workplaces and reducing overall staff numbers, particularly those of administrative staff. The result is to increase the skill requirements of workers, although often without clear recognition of the change by employers. The changes in skill demand are:

• increased requirements for skills in cooperation and negotiation amongst casual and contract staff as they are required to negotiate their positions in organisations

• increased requirements for a range of administrative skills amongst supervisory staff to whom tasks are devolved as overall staff numbers are reduced. These include skills such as budgeting, management, OH&S, rostering, and complaints handling.
  

It would be unwise for the VET system to base future developments on putative changes in work organisation arising from widespread adoption of high-performance practices, given that there is virtually no evidence of their widespread embedding in Australian workplaces. Instead, the system might serve its students better for the realities of workplace change if it developed their skills in areas such as:

• cooperation and negotiation

• administrative, supervisory and even management skills.

It may be particularly valuable to impart these skills to workers employed on a contract or casual basis or those at risk of becoming so employed, given that such workers are generally less likely to receive employer-sponsored training.