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Jan

2012

Are All Employees Knowledge Workers?

"Ask executives to identify the talent within their firm and many will focus on the top tiers of management. Often, they will include in this august group the "high potentials" being groomed for leadership roles. Sometimes, they will extend the boundaries to include "creative talent" or "knowledge workers". But then there is the rest of the workforce."

blogs.hbr.org/...ll-employees-knowledge-wo.html

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knowledgeworkers employees creativity creativeclass highpotentials tacitroles problemsolving collaboration talent rightbrain

But his focus on the creative class unintentionally diminishes the potential contributions from other parts of the workforce.
When executives focus on "knowledge workers", they lose sight of the fact that even highly routinized jobs require improvisation and the use of judgment in ambiguous situations, especially if the goal is to drive performance to new levels
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- Even the most "routine" work is becoming far less so while our mindsets about our workforce continue to hold on to comfortable categories.
- we need to focus on more creative "right brain" jobs
- Perhaps the single greatest lesson from Japanese auto manufacturers is that all employees are ultimately knowledge workers and that the role of the firm is to both encourage and support problem-solving by all employees
- In encouraging and supporting problem-solving by these employees, the Japanese auto makers were able to give their work new meaning and unleashed much more passion on the factory floor. The lesson is clear: we undermine our potential for performance improvement with labels that draw artificial boundaries through our workforce.
- We will begin to redefine all jobs, especially those performed at the front line (or, in an image, that reveals our prevalent management mindset, the "bottom" of the institutional pyramid), in ways that facilitate problem solving, experimentation, and tinkering