High Performance Work Systems

¶ … high performance work system as an organization where every element of people, technology and organizational structure is highly integrated, fitting well together as a smoothly-functioning whole (Chapter 16). One company that has fostered a high performance work system is FedEx. The assets of the company are its fleet of vehicles, its network of stations, and the personnel the run both. The business model is basically a series of hub and spoke networks. While the tasks is are highly routinized, they are performed round the clock, so that every day a plane leaves from a location filled with parcels, lands at a major depot, where the packages are sorted and loaded onto another plane. The fact that a package is only going to stay in the system for 12-24 hours implies that there needs to be a high degree of interconnectedness. On any given day, a package from Point A will be destined for Point B, and those two points could be anywhere in the world -- the company has to be so well-integrated that it can handle with ease any of the millions of permutations of pickup and delivery points in its system.

Furthermore, all of the other aspects of the business have to be integrated with this main system. The customer service system, the retail stores, and the support functions all need to be integrated in a manner that allows the customer to have common points of contact. A customer may deal with its sales rep in one city about an issue occurring in another city, and the company has to be able to respond quickly to make sure that the problem is resolved.

One of the most important elements in a high functioning work system is that there is a higher degree of employee empowerment. The employees are trained better, and have a degree of autonomy in their work. At FedEx, the routine nature of the work means that employees actually do not have that much autonomy -- it is easy for managers to predict the daily course of the work. But there are some instances where there is autonomy -- couriers create their own routes, sales and service people are free to go the extra mile, and ultimately all employees are empowered to solve customer problems. The autonomy that employees have to solve problems in particular helps to improve employee attitudes, along with a stock sharing plan, creating an atmosphere where the employees feel as though they are contributing to a whole, successful, system (Harley, 2002).

There are several ways that I can contribute to a high performance work system. I do not work for FedEx, but wherever I work I can take some of the basics with me. For example, in a high performance work system, constant training is encouraged. People are expected to continually learn and improve, and this is something that I can do in my work. If I worked for a company that ran as a high performance work system, I feel that empowering myself with multiple different skills and a broad set of knowledge will be of tremendous value.