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Chapter 9 People, jobs and organization 253
Figure 9.9 Ergonomics in the office environment
Work measurement
to schedule, and many other vital pieces of information that are needed to manage any
operation. Without some estimate of work times, operations managers are ‘flying blind’. At
the same time it does not need much thought before it becomes clear that measuring work
times must be difficult to do with any degree of accuracy or confidence. The time you take
to do any task will depend on how skilled you are at the task, how much experience you
have, how energetic or motivated you are, whether you have the appropriate tools, what the
environmental conditions are, how tired you are, and so on. So, at best, any ‘measurement’
of how long a task will, or should, take, will be an estimate. It will be our ‘best guess’ of how
much time to allow for the task. That is why we call this process of estimating work times
‘work time allocation’. We are allocating a time for completing a task because we need to
do so for many important operations management decisions. For example, work times are
needed for:
● Planning how much work a process can perform (its capacity).
● Deciding how many staff are needed to complete tasks.
● Scheduling individual tasks to specific people.
● Balancing work allocation in processes (see Chapter 7).
● Costing the labour content of a product or service.
● Estimating the efficiency or productivity of staff and/or processes.
● Calculating bonus payments (less important than it was at one time).
Notwithstanding the weak theoretical basis of work measurement, understanding the
relationship between work and time is clearly an important part of job design. The advantage
of structured and systematic work measurement is that it gives a common currency for the
evaluation and comparison of all types of work. So, if work time allocation is important,
how should it be done? In fact, there is a long-standing body of knowledge and experience
in this area. This is generally referred to as ‘work measurement’, although as we have said,