Factory work, and, indeed, call centre work has long been subject to criticism for the working conditions their staff are compelled to endure. Commonly employing the less educated and the more desperate, their workers are either ignorant of their rights or too needy to be willing to object, being simply grateful for the wage that keeps the roof over their heads, food on the table and the children in clothing. But what of clerical workers in the finance and insurance sectors?
Office jobs are largely considered to be rather more comfortable, with office workers enjoying plush surroundings and decent wages, with the stress of a 9-5 shift of chairpounding being nothing in comparison to 8 hours straight arduous labour. But as the industry has gone through a rather difficult time of late, the larger operators have felt the need to be evermore watchful of their performance - and the reverberations of these industry-wide difficulties have impacted upon the daily lives of their employees.
Such companies now need to be seen to be "effective" - in their spending and their use of resource. The most fundamental resource any company has - and most costly - is its work force.
Of course, a company's effectiveness - be they producers of trainers, cars or insurance policy documents - is most readily measured in terms of output. For an insurance company, number of applications received and converted into active policies is an obvious measure of this output. But as with any industry, the efficiency of the "end-to-end" process - from application to the time the policyholder starts paying premiums is also an important factor.
Time is money. This is never more true than where the processing of life insurance is concerned. The simple fact is that the longer it takes to process an application, the more it costs, and with policies costing as little as £5 per month, it can take a very long time to recoup the administration costs of many policies. There is no simple solution to this problem, although the larger companies have spent a lot of time and money coming up with some.
Allocating times to various common administrative tasks has been one adopted method of addressing the issue. The times given to each task were based on an "average" time it took a "fully skilled" worker to perform the tasks in a series of preliminary tests. But averages don't always work: there is no such thing as a true average, be it an average task or an average worker. However skilled a worker may be, they may not be as fast as another. And even the fastest worker may be able to produce letters at a rate of one every four and a half minutes for half an hour, but over the course of a full working day? It's not easy to sustain the momentum often achieved in "controlled" or "test" conditions. What about drink and toilet breaks? All included in the very generous 15% added to all tasks. But when many tasks are only allocated one minute and thirty-two seconds inclusive of the 15%, it's clear how time management can become tricky for the worker who isn't as swift as worker as their colleague.
But does the customer care if it took four minutes or six to type them a letter, provided the information it contains is accurate and their name an address is correctly spelled? Apparently turnover is of greater importance than accuracy if it means the cost of the premiums can be kept down. Of course customers want good customer service, but above all, good customer service equals fast and cheap. Or so the workers are told.
It's perhaps not surprising that many workers feel that this method of monitoring productivity is frequently used as a stick with which to beat them rather than a simple method of measurement. I myself experienced the more negative aspects of the benefits of structuring the working day in this way in a recent appraisal. My manager began by scrutinising my productivity, informing me that I had achieved an average (again, note - average) level of 103% productivity during the last 6 months. That's three per cent more work done each day than the hours I worked. How did I feel about this? Pretty good, I thought, and said as much. My manager thought otherwise, and proceeded to tell me so, in no uncertain terms for the next 15 minutes. As an experienced member of staff (some six years of service at the time) I should be averaging in the region of 115-120%. Moreover, being capable of much more, I was simply coasting, "working within myself," and was, essentially lazy, especially considering the manager's belief that the times were "generous." My quality (also subject to scrutiny), was well above the objective levels set by the company, but was not sufficient to redeem me, resulting in my receiving a well below-inflation pay rise for the year. A large number of consumers boycott companies like Nike for their alleged use of sweatshop production lines. Far fewer boycott insurance companies on the same grounds.
