I have strongly come to the conclusion that a lot of managers try to avoid hard-work and use their minds (Yes, I know some people would smirk and say what took you so long. But I had my reasons).
What with things like reports, trackings, models, guidelines, frameworks etc.
If you put in a framework or methodology, ultimately you are trying to force the human mind to work in a certain narrow path, which is not something that should be encouraged. A number of articles are appearing one after another trumpeting the idea that innovation cannot be regulated. It has to be groomed but cannot be 'modelised' in any way. But some managers tend to create models which they feel is a great thing that they are doing. The model would be that the reportee would need to commit a date by which he/she would finish 'thinking' about a new idea, followed by a date by which the reportee would need to commit a date by which to finish 'thinking' about the innovation or application or mechanism to implement the new idea, followed lastly by a date by which a paper or a prototype of the idea would be ready.
Also a mechanism or a spreadsheet using the timelines to track these milestones.
Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous. It does not work and slowly the effort around this also dies down.
That takes me to another point, the fact of creating trackers for 'everything'. That again makes the managers' job easier. They just need to look at the tracker and find out where things stand. That is another matter that most of the times the trackers are made to look good so that the manager may not fire back. So managers can stay away from the ground reality and just look at the tracker and feel happy at what is being reported as the progress.
In call centers, agents are trained on using the keyboard in a fixed sequence of hand movements. The quality analysts say that they have arrived at these by going through motion studies. That I believe is the best example of the attempt by organisations and managements to mechanise the working and thinking of humans.
Another observation in this regard has been at ICICI Bank at DLF Qutub Plaza branch, which might be the case elsewhere too.
There had been 'compartments' made instead of desks. There were a total of 9 of them and each had a number hung on top of them. There was one bank employee sitting behind a desk at each compartment having a computer and a printer on their desk.
It reminded me of workstations in a call-center or even better, the counters at the railway reservation system.
One cannot just approach any 'compartment' with your query or request. I was redirected to a terminal where I had to punch in my request type and get a token with an assigned queue number. There is a terminal which displays the queue number and the 'compartment' number which keeps updating so that when your turn comes, your queue number and the 'compartment' to which it is assigned is displayed and you can move there and have your query sorted out.
It really seemed very impersonal and mechanical. Banks, as I have grown up, signify a vibrant place with a lot of mixing up of people. But this was just so individualistic. In traditional banks - read PSU ones-there would be less literate people asking others to fill in a check or requests for drafts. All the forms would be available in at least two languages. The above experience seemed to end all that.
Change from pen and paper to computers was just a change of the medium of recording. This change of medium also had the advantages of increasing efficiency of computations and faster data transfers, hence it was a welcome change. But this is a whole lot different and raises a lot of questions.
Using the terminal to get the tokens is non-trivial. To those who are not very well educated or are not technology savy it will be very tough. Does ICICI bank intend not to keep and serve those customers? Moreover, I believe that these tokens will be tracked and computed in terms of rate per transaction for 'Management' to review. It makes banking impersonal and makes working in Banks so mechanical.
What a contradiction! We are trying to make machines intelligent and humans mechanical!!
