Gamified Labor 'On The Clock'

My Own Pace

In June of 1991 I began my career as a rural letter carrier, working for the Post Office.

And what a lucky break that was.

Why lucky?  Rural carriers (as opposed to city carriers) are paid a daily salary based on the difficulty of their route.  Routes are periodically evaluated to determine how many boxes and miles are involved, and how much mail carried.  Mileage, boxes and quantities of various kinds of mail are fed into a spreadsheet that generates an expected number of hours a day.  But whether rural carriers take more or less time to deliver on a given day, they're paid for that evaluation.  Which means that work can become a game, with efficiency king.

What do I mean by efficiency?   Work is not recreation.  It is not what we would choose to do if we weren't being paid to do it.  So, the mind's natural reaction is to imagine ways to minimize work.  This is being efficient.  The unnatural reaction most work pushes us towards involves doing the least amount of actual work in the greatest amount of time; being inefficient.

We all know the psychology involved in being inefficient.  If waiting in the doctor's office, for example, the desire for time to pass is greater than the delight in exploring the present.  Work is similar.  If paid by the hour, there's no natural incentive to minimize work.  In fact, if our workload is increased when we're more productive, efficiency actually works against us.  Likewise, if paid by the hour to do a specific task, like fix a sink or toilet, the 'natural' reaction is to prolong the task.  Which means that because most people are honorable, they're constantly fighting the headwind of their own self-interest.

Placed in this context, a rural carrier's evaluated pay system, since it harmonizes the interests of worker and management, is wonderful indeed.   But there's more!   I've found that as a worker on the lookout for efficiencies I learn to be awake to opportunity, and this rubs off on home life, and some might say, on personality in general.  And this, in turn, allows us as humans, potentially, to progress.  When we're generally more aware and conscious of the choices we make, we all benefit.

If we can find a way to use 'evaluated' pay in other lines of employment, then, the game is afoot.

All of us have likely been in a Post Office, have stood in line, and been waited on by a postal clerk.  And most of the time we're likely too busy with our own experience to imagine what it's like to work behind the counter.  But for a moment, let's stand in a clerk's shoes and pretend that each transaction we complete, whether it's selling stamps, mailing a package or answering a question, is automatically recorded electronically.  Our 'transactions total' for the day is then compared to an evaluation based on engineered time studies that determine how long a particular duty takes.  If we complete 100% or less of our evaluation, there's no effect on our paycheck.  Anything over 100%, however, is added to paid vacation, which we use at a later date at our discretion.

We're motivated!  If we keep customers moving through the waiting line by seeking out efficiencies, we win.

Yeah, but what about the quality of our work?  Wouldn't we naturally want to rush customers through and treat them as mere figures on a flowchart?  Not if our evaluation included the quality, as well as the quantity of our work.  Mystery shoppers, who evaluate the postal window experience, have long been used by postal management to keep track of work quality.

And how does management benefit?  Simple, because many attempts by clerks to reach the 100+% zone would abandon 80 and 90% for 90 and 100%.  Plus, fewer hours are needed, if eight clerks can do the work of nine.

Would this work for other lines of employment that don't have a computerized record of every transaction?  Maybe.  It certainly could work for individual post offices, many of which are currently micro-managed from above.

Examples of management bloat in modern bureaucracy are not hard to come by.  Top-down yes-sir toadying is the bane of effective operations.  The antidote is localized decision-making.  And in an age of computerized analysis, where all statistics, including the mighty bottom line, are at a manager's fingertips, it should be a simple matter of setting guidelines, and progressively elevated expectations, then getting out of the way.  For the US Postal Service, this could mean that an individual postmaster who improves, overall, on a mix of performance measures is given greater autonomy.

This wouldn't be a namby-pamby lack of supervision (fewer periodic 'inspections'), but rather, things like allowing unions to self-regulate (keeping office-wide statistical records that are used to reform and reward); small-bore, but significant revenue sharing (bonuses for consistent improvement); and dramatic media --> community outreach (maybe contests to earmark a share of bonuses to charity and so encourage the use of post office products).

For all its attractions, the gamification of labor will likely take a while to catch on, so the more likely, early adopters, will probably have to convince the otherwise skeptical by example.  The Postal Service with its intense, internal record-keeping seems a likely place to start.

Postman's Brief

Insider's Recommendation

My day job is perfectly suited to my life as a ponderer (Why do colas remind me of race tracks ?), designer, and all-around dabbler in the garden of earthly delight.

Why? Because I work for the Post Office as a rural carrier, which is one of the few jobs that pays a salary without requiring an employee have a specialist's degree.

And a salary, my friends, means that when one's work is done for the day, one goes home. No 'dogging' the clock or otherwise 'killing time'. Instead, if one is clever, one builds efficiency into one's routine, organizing the mail so that it takes less and less time to deliver.

The Post Office, meanwhile, is facing a major financial crunch. An article in Business Week (May 26th, '11) lays out a worst-case analysis under the sub-heading:

Facing insolvency, can the USPS reinvent itself like European services have--or will it implode?

Herein I lay out the case for why said article is likely off-base. I also provide the persevering reader with my own take on what need be done to fix USPS finances.

First off, let's keep in mind that the USPS delivers a full 40% of the world's mail. In other words, we send and receive more mail than most other countries, so a gradual decline in mail volume will still leave the USPS with much to deliver.

Secondly, salaries and benefits make up a surprising 80% of all USPS costs. That sounds depressing, until you realize that as mail volume declines, a reduced number of employees is almost all that's needed to make ends meet.

Take the route that I deliver. As mail volume has fallen off over the past few years, I've added new boxes as new houses are built. The upshot is that I'm carrying about the same amount of mail, traveling a bit further each day, but my salary hasn't changed.

That takes care of routes in areas with growth; but what about locations with declining population? Simple: retiring carriers are not replaced. Instead, their routes are split up among other nearby routes.

The same thing is true for clerks. Less mail can mean a gradual lowering of employee numbers.

And currently, for both carriers and clerks, automation is ongoing. For example, the USPS is involved in an on-going transformation that will see carriers receive their flat mail (newspapers, magazines, large envelopes) pre-sorted by machine. This automation follows a similar transformation for letter mail. The up-shot is that fewer clerks or carriers are needed. This is obvious for clerks; machines sort mail many times faster than do humans. And for carriers, we'll be paid much less to deliver sorted flat mail, meaning route consolidation when carriers retire.

What I'm suggesting, then, is that declining mail volume, if it isn't too precipitous, can be managed, without resorting to overly dramatic changes in the status quo (a 5-day work week, for example).

Two questions remain, however. What about the $15 billion or so in debt that the USPS has accumulated over the past 4-5 years? And what would I do, if I were able to tweak the system?

In addition to the automation referenced above, management is looking at closing hundreds of small, inefficient post offices around the country. There is also talk of five-day delivery each week, instead of six. Plus, there is the huge amount that the USPS must pay each year--for the next half dozen or so years--to pre-fund retiree's health benefits; if that mandate were waived, the PO would currently be in the black. Some combination of these things would seem likely in the near future.

And what would I recommend?

* The salary-based work I do has taught me to look for efficiencies in all things

* I wish others had the ability to control their work, treating it as if one were a farmer doing chores.

This is something I will expand on in the months and years to come.