Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

84 EFFICIENCY METHODS very carefully, or their efforts will make the manage- ment look foolish, and produce a harmful effect on the workers. Wherever possible more than one observer should be set to work, as the statistics will be much more valuable if personal idiosyncrasies can be eliminated by comparison and repetition. Each observer should be a man already trained in scientific method, but he must not be a novice with regard to the operation being observed. The workmen must feel quite sure that he already knows a good deal about their work. He should then stand beside each workman as a colleague and co-operator, not as one having authority over him, but still less, emphatically, as an ignorant person whose sole equipment consists of stop-watch, pencil, and paper.1 i The later exponents of time-study methods insist very strongly that no workman should have the details of his work studied and timed except with his fullest consent and co- operation. It seems that friction and ill-feeling have been caused by surreptitious time-observation, as must be, indeed, natural. It would be a very tactless mistake to put the observer in the position of a spy who is noting something which the worker is assumed to wish to conceal. Taylor and Thompson say in “ Concrete Costs,” that the practice of observing a workman's time of doing an operation without his knowledge is to be deprecated generally, but may occasionally prove useful or necessary. The main thing, apparently, is not to be detected in the act ! Of course, only the very simplest apparatus could be used for observations of this kind, and the more recent workers favour rather elaborate machines and methods, which must be in evidence. Detailed advice as to the actual use of a stop-watch is given in the articles on time-study mentioned in the text, in Taylor’s ** Shop Management,” and in Parkhurst’s " Applied Methods of Scientific Management ” ; while the more elaborate machinery is described in Mr. Gilbreth’s " Motion Study,” and in recent magazine articles on his work.