Measures of life: Performance management, commitment and work life balance
Anders Raastrup Kristensen, Copenhagen Business School
The paper examines how conditions for balancing between work and domestic life are effected by changes in the measurement of employees’ productivity. Such measures range from working hours to performance. Its empirical point of departure is Novozymes, the largest manufacture of enzymes in the world. Seven focus group interviews involving twenty-five employees and ten managers from the finance and R&D departments were conducted over a period of two months.
Since Peter Drucker’s revolutionary invention of management by objectives (MBO), companies all over the world have developed and implemented new forms of managing and measuring the employees’ creation of value. The idea of MBO has today developed into performance management.
Measurement in terms of performance management implies four important changes. First, there has been a change from input (e.g., working hours and working motions) towards output (e.g., performance). The unit of management has accordingly shifted from work place and working time, as exemplified by Frederick W. Taylor’s idea of time and motion studies, towards the life and subjectivity of the employees. Third, the shift towards measurement of output implies that the creation of value can no longer be separated from the subjectivity and life of the employees in general (e.g., commitment and employability). Fourth, performance management tries not only to guide organizational development but also the development of the individual. That is, performance management affect both personal development plans and organizational strategies.
The paper argues that the changes in measurement of value render home life and work life indiscernible. There is no longer a given or institutional division between work and domestic life, i.e., it is not possible for the employee to leave work at the office. Hereby, balancing between work and domestic life becomes a question of self-management. It does not only implies rules for boundary control (i.e., where should I draw the line between work and home?) but also rules for the productivity of the individual employees (i.e., should I consider this activity work?). The employees develop individual rules for when to interpret something as work. To provide an example, in one of the focus group interviews an employee explained that he always sees mail-correspondences after normal working hours as work. One of his colleagues, by contrast, regarded the same task (in the evenings) as work only if he spends more than 30 minutes on it, while a third colleague did not see it as work at all because he could not wait to read and answer the mail until the next day. “So why should the company pay me for that,” as he explained.
While this paper is informed by the tradition of critical management studies, it might more accurately be called a clinical management study, drawing on the Gilles Deleuze’s “critical and clinical” project.