Over the past two days, I've interviewed three pros in job training and placement for entry-level workers: New York Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs; The Partnership for New Communities in Chicago executive Maria Hibbs; and Alex Frankel, author of Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee.

Linda Gibbs provided a set of dispiriting facts about the challenges cities face in placing low-skilled workers into jobs. In today's New York, 46% of the 1.5 million poor people actually work. And one-third of them work 40 hours or more per week! Unless these workers can, in fact, move into higher paying jobs, they will continue to require significant public benefits.

I asked Alex, who worked the front line for UPS, Starbucks, Apple, and the Gap, among other employers (and was turned down for work by the Container Store and never got an offer from Whole Foods), if he could think of any way front line jobs could be redesigned to make them more valuable, and therefore, command higher wages. (Caveat: Alex worked primarily for employers who generally pay more.)

His answer was interesting. He contrasted his work at Starbucks and Gap. At the Gap, he said, employees wandered the store aimlessly (and endlessly) folding clothes, whereas at Starbucks "it was more efficient, tighter, with employees busy every minute."

And he added, "Front-line employees know the customer better than anyone. If companies could take advantage of that knowledge for research purposes, that would make the front-line worker more valuable to the employer."

The subject of job redesign at the front line gets very little attention. We focus most of our efforts on devising public supports to supplement wages that are too low to get workers out of poverty.

My good colleague Kip Bergstrom who heads the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council (and is one of the smartest guys I know) contends that the problem of low wages can't be fixed with job redesign. He contends that only business model redesign will impact the problem of too-low wages.

Kip may be right (and it's never smart to bet against him), but I would still like to see what might happen if a group of savvy designers tackled the challenge of redesigning front-line jobs. It wouldn't solve the problem Maria identifies of people who simply have no concept of work, need childcare or lack basic literacy skills and job habits, but it could potentially go a long way to changing a situation where 22% of poor people in NYC work full-time.

Kip Bergstrom, November 30, 2007

There is not a sharp line between business model redesign and restructuring front line jobs, especially in lower wage sectors. The "business model" change I'm talking about is one that recognizes that in a service business, the front line worker is the "product" as they define the customer experience. The typical front line worker has 100X more customer contact than the typical CEO. Unless a business can figure out how to engage its front line workers in imoproving the customer experience in ways that the customer is willing to pay for, the business cannot innovate meaningfully. The key is to empower frontline workers as problem solvers, deploying technology to do their rules-based tasks and developing their abilities in expert thinking and complex communication. Doing so will vastly improve service sector productivity, enable increased wages for frontline workers, and reduce the growing income inequality that threatens the basic foundation of our nation.

Link: http://ripolicy.org

Louis Soares, November 30, 2007

Transforming the entry level workplace is through job redesign that focused on value maximizing business models is a sustainable solution to wage and mobility challenges for low income workers exactly because they are based on value creation not skills remediation. The companies noted above that pay more are creating relationship based on inreased value in the customer experience of the the products and service they are buying. Whole Foods for example uses democratic approach to hiring. A team in a store decides after a month long trial if the new hire is a good fit for the team. This type of frontline culture develops the communication, ownership and problemsolving skills that make someone promotable and provides them a sense of controling there own destiny. Public programs should be built to support and encourage business models that develop these skills in workers. In this way, we leverage public funds to transform the workplace into a learning and opportunity ladder by delivering bottomline value to business. This would require a re-thinking of public policy to focus on general service science/relationship building skills. The old notion of soft skills has always been the wrong focus because it made them and auxiliary skill. At the front line, soft skills leverage with the right use of technology are the key pieces of human capital.

Link: http://www.americanprogress.org

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