Everybody knows that when organisations refer obliquely to “cutting costs through use of IT”, they’ve got at least one eye on the possibility of being able to cut some labour cost out. Of course, no-one likes talking about this directly, so we prefer to talk about “allowing people to concentrate on delivering more value to customers” or “enabling our staff to concentrate on the high-value tasks” instead. Ideally though, most bosses would like to run their businesses with fewer people.

I was reading another of Keith Swenson’s thought-provoking posts the other day – BPM Makes the Workplace More Stressful – and nodding along, particularly at the part where he said:

I recently re-read Viktor Frankl’s classic “Man’s Search for Meaning” and noted in an unimportant passage this quote: “… progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker.“  Nothing could be further from the truth, yet this was the common view of automation in the 1950′s … These visions of the future seem natural, but ignore the competitive effects of economics.

Keith then goes on to say

BPM (all types) has been very successful in automating work, and making organizations more productive than before.  But the work remaining after automation is more stressful on the employees.

Then, though, I spent the day at  the Inspiring Performance customer event hosted by Nimbus Partners in London, and I heard Ashley Cook speak. Ashley is currently Operations Director at Best Buy Europe, and previously held the same role at Carphone Warehouse before it became part of BBE.

He told the story of how BBE (and Carphone before them) had used Nimbus’ technology to deliver interactive process knowledge applications into over 800 retail stores, and how this had not only made a very significant impact on customer satisfaction scores; it had made retail employees happier too. As he said, he discovered that

Standardisation liberates people.

This is pretty interesting, and it seems to run counter to what Keith says.

Why? My reading is that there are at least three reasons.

First, prior to the rollout of this knowledge application (called “How2″ at Carphone Warehouse) retail staff often found it very difficult to keep on top of changing product lines, provisioning requirements, customer service practices and so on. Customer satisfaction took a hit because service levels were very variable, but the retail staff found this situation very stressful too. With the application deployed, staff could quickly and consistently service customer demands, even in a fast-changing environment. A lack of structure and process was causing stress.

Second is perhaps a quirk of the retail environment. Any physical retail environment is different from a call-centre or other “virtual” environment: the demand for work from employees isn’t only driven by competition and the profit motive, it’s also constrained by the number of customers in the shop. It’s not like having a retail employee helping a customer 60 seconds quicker means another customer can come through the door more quickly (unless you have very, very small retail stores). What’s happened instead is that Carphone’s retail people have been able to concentrate more on delivering a great experience to customers, and worry less about whether they’re doing all the “fulfilment” stuff the right way.

Third, and I think equally important, is the way that the change happened. The way in which Carphone and BBE have gone about creating How2 has put front-line staff right in the middle of the process. The project team didn’t spend ages trying to model perfect processes; their philosophy was “get it in”. They delivered something to get everyone standardised on what everyone knew was an imperfect set of procedures, and then actively encouraged retail staff to get involved in suggesting changes, making change happen and then championing that change. The employees didn’t have “process done to them”: they took responsibility for making it happen.

Now the beady-eyed among you will notice that Keith was talking about “automation”, and in this example I’ve been referring to “standardisation”. Perhaps they’re different things, and that explains why the people involved in the change felt less stressed rather than more so? I’m not sure though. In most cases what we refer to as “automation” isn’t really complete automation; it’s automation of certain aspects of tasks, together with automation of the flow of work between people and systems. In the Carphone / BBE example, the automation in play is certainly lightweight, but it’s also true that the system in place does create a more prescriptive environment.

Perhaps instead there are a combination of factors at work. At this point I’m very happy to admit that I haven’t got it all figured out, though… what do you think?