Applying System Thinking to Job Design in the Utility Sector

System Thinking and Job Design

Introduction

“Systems thinking is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way different parts of a system interact and how they influence one another within a whole” (Dr. Jennifer Teague, executive director of business programs at Southern New Hampshire University).

Wikipedia says systems thinking is a way of making sense of the world’s complexity by examining it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by dividing it into parts.

This paper explores the linkages between system thinking and job design since it is beneficial to consider the big picture (and the details) concurrently in many aspects of business, including job design and its close cousin, organizational structure.

Excessive Workload

It is not uncommon to hear employees say they are overworked. However, different forms of excessive workload require different remedies.

Employees may simply have more work than they can accomplish within the required timelines on an ongoing, steady basis. This simple capacity balance problem can only be solved by reducing the total volume of work or increasing resources.

Employees may struggle with workload for specific periods of time, akin to feeling ‘slammed’ during rush hour. A condition that exacerbates this problem is when a team feels overwhelmed and sees other teams in the same company who are not stressed and not pitching in to help. That creates a ‘fairness’ issue in the minds of the employees.

Employees may feel overloaded because they do more work than the job requires. This can only be solved by venturing into the systemic and psychological drivers behind why employees(s) act the way they do. This can be challenging because it could be something in the employee’s mind, such as the inability to ‘let some things go’ due to a lack of trust. However, it may also be a condition management has created, such as attempting to hold employees accountable for something beyond what their role really should be.

System Thinking for the Periodic Workload ‘Crunch’

A periodic workload crunch is when employees can handle the workload at some times of the day, week, or year but also face periods when the workload exceeds what they can manage.

A simple example would be a restaurant where the number of customers peaks for the lunch and dinner hours. The inevitable challenge is staffing correctly for the quiet periods and the busy times while maintaining performance standards. Strategies to manage the periodic workload in a restaurant range from staggering and splitting employee shifts to staggering customer reservations to offering customers incentives to come in during the quieter periods, such as “happy hour” pricing.

In the electric utility sector, periodic workload can be seasonal, with increases in customer-driven work for the summer construction period or the impact of extreme weather events. However, the periodic workload swings can also be caused (or exacerbated) by corporate structure and job design choices.

For an electric utility company, a logical option to address the increase in customer demand for work in the summer construction season is to plan non-customer work (maintenance and program work) for the slower periods of the year. However, if a utility were to structure itself to split its field crews by work type, dealing with seasonality would be more challenging. In a utility with separate trouble crews, construction crews, maintenance crews, and strong ‘job demarcation,’ customer-focused crews will express concern about being understaffed in the summer, and the trouble crews will report that they are overwhelmed during weather events. The dilemma with this situation is that job task analysis tends to reveal that both groups of employees are right; they get overloaded at times, and the most common remedy proposed to solve the problem is that “we need more staff.” Of course, the problem with that solution is that staffing for peak periods and carrying the same resources for non-peak periods is expensive for the business.

A better approach to solving this dilemma is to apply system thinking and consider where there are opportunities to move the workload around to align with the resources or move the resources around to align with the work.

An example of system thinking found in many electric utilities involves Design Technicians and storm response, where Design Technicians set aside their regular work during the storm and fill the role of damage assessors to aid in the storm recovery effort. In this example, the system thinking is that the interruption does not adversely impact the Design Technician’s regular work because the Lines Crews who build their designs are also being affected by storm recovery (everyone’s regular work shifts by a day or two due to the storm). Design Technicians also have the skill sets to be effective damage assessors, making the transition possible.

This kind of system thinking