Changing the Way We Work

Rating:
Summary: A Plug for Workset
Review: How many problems at work arise from the way in which job specifications are defined? Either employees don't have a clear understanding of their duties and responsibilities, spending time and energy disentangling them from those of their colleagues, or they are hemmed in by job descriptions that allow no room for movement and initiative.

In Changing The Way We Work, Belbin proposes Workset, an alternative system where jobs can grow and develop: where communication about the work can flow up as easily as down. It is a radical approach, incorporating colour-coding and information technology, as a new means of delivering greater efficiency in a dynamic process that equally involves managers and their employees.

This book would be of interest to human resource managers and academics specialising in organisational behaviour and development.

Born in 1926, Dr Raymond Meredith Belbin is regarded as the father of team-role theory. He obtained his first degree and doctorate from the University of Cambridge and has conducted research on work study at Cranfield since the 1950s. His other books include Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail, Team Roles at Work, and The Coming Shape of Organization. In 1988, he founded Belbin Associates which produces INTERPLACE, team role software for human resource management, used by 30% of UK's top 100 companies.

Reviewed by Azlan Adnan. Formerly Business Development Manager with KPMG, Azlan is currently Managing Partner of Azlan & Koh Knowledge and Professional Management Group, an education and management consulting practice based in Kota Kinabalu. He holds a Master's degree in International Business and Management from the Westminster Business School.

Rating:
Summary: Quirky but useful
Review: Since 1980 or earlier, Belbin has been concerned with the way in which we work together and what it is that makes joint work effective.

In his earlier work Belbin identified nine team roles, each of which has a place in successful design and completion of the work of a team. He argues that each person has most and least preferred roles, that the balance of requirements for success tends to change over the life of a project, and that team performance can be greatly enhanced through attention to matching skills and preferences to the role needs. His typology is by now quite well-known, links well to personality preferences such as those measured by the Myers Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) and has been melded with MBTI in at least one popular 'instrument' used for analyzing individual and team performance.

In Changing the Way We Work, Belbin turns his attention to the nature of work and ways in which it can be organized. His system is derived from an analysis of the nature of jobs, tasks, roles and responsibilities, the various ways in which work can be undertaken by individuals or in groups or teams, and the variety of possible relationships between the manager and those undertaking the worker.

His system makes use of colour coding of seven classifications of work. Both the classification and the colour coding are designed as a tool for building a shared language within an organization through which work requirements and alternative approaches to executing the work can be discussed and agreed.

In some ways, Belbin's analysis reads as being rather 'old-fashioned'. This is because he develops his argument about the nature of work, tasks and roles from a historical perspective, reaching right back to the days of work study (or industrial engineering) and tracing the development of concepts of the job through time study, the development of synthetic standards and the rise of derivative methodologies such as reengineering. One side effect is to make the book a rewarding text for those interested in the history of the development of work organization. Another is to establish a very solid foundation for understanding the distinctions between a job, a task, a role and associated responsibility. This is valuable because these distinctions are often lost in material on this subject.

By taking this historical approach, he provides a solid basis for identifying types of work arrangement derived from the nature of the work itself and proceeds from there to explore how this interacts with the preferences of workers. Part of the value of this approach is that it provides an alternative perspective to the popular current view which tends to work back from worker aspirations and motivation to the work to be done.

The style of the book is unusually personal, laced with examples from the author's personal journey to develop his typology and sometimes illustrated with quite curious examples such as the author's preferred way of using a potato peeler.

In a world dominated by North American texts, this book could only have been written by someone from an English culture, and some people are likely to find the style and cultural assumptions to be distracting. However, whether or not you accept the system as a whole, the material gives a great deal of well structured food for thought.