But perhaps business reports, proposals, and other documents written by a single person will someday be as rare as handcrafted clothing and furniture are today. Hyperspecialization offers significant advantages for companies, workers, and society as a whole. But it has a potential dark side, which must be addressed. Although many of these advantages and disadvantages also occur with the outsourcing and distribution of work, they arise in specific ways with hyperspecialization.
Hyperspecialization offers both workers and companies much more flexibility than traditional employment arrangements do. Individuals can often work where and when they choose. Agents for LiveOps, which provides call center outsourcing, find this flexibility very attractive, because it allows them to operate from home and makes it easier to balance work with personal responsibilities.
And the autonomy workers feel when they can choose their own assignments has a strong appeal. For companies, hyperspecialization allows capacity to be ramped up and down very rapidly. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Red Cross hotline was overwhelmed with calls from people offering to contribute or volunteer. The agency quickly engaged LiveOps agents, who handled more than 17, calls over the next few days.
Hyperspecialization can also ameliorate the skills mismatch that plagues many national labor markets. These shortages might be alleviated by redefining jobs so that, for example, skilled accountants coordinated the work of hyperspecialists doing the lower-skilled aspects of the job.
People who face barriers in traditional job markets might benefit from hyperspecialization as well. This can be liberating for young people looking for a first break, seniors seeking to stay connected to the work world, or those who risk discrimination in face-to-face workplaces. Pearl Interactive Network, an Ohio-based company that performs outsourced tasks for pfizerWorks, primarily employs people with disabilities. Hyperspecialization also provides virtual labor mobility for people who live in developing countries.
Wages in advanced economies can exceed those in some emerging nations by as much as a factor of eight. Being able to undertake small tasks on sites like Samasource and txteagle can thus significantly improve the economic standing of workers in, say, Africa and South Asia.
These wages result in part from labor market arbitrage. What are viewed as sweatshop wages in advanced economies can be quite attractive to workers in developing countries. But as economic development worldwide advances in the coming decades, labor market arbitrage will become less common, and at least some of this wage gap is likely to close.
And, of course, the exploitation of workers is not confined to the web. Thus workers may unknowingly be contributing to something counter to their personal beliefs. This highlights a related problem: Small-task intermediaries like Mechanical Turk have made it easier to game the internet. And when work is divided into tiny tasks, it may become dull and meaningless, perhaps even producing ill psychological effects on the people who perform it.
Two other potential problems are the growing amount of work done on spec that is, with no guarantee of payment and the increased surveillance of electronically connected workers. Neither is unique to hyperspecialization: Spec work has long been prevalent in fields like graphic design and writing, and close surveillance of workers is still common in factories.
And other intermediaries have pushed electronic surveillance to a degree many find ominous. Finally, over the long term hyperspecialization may eliminate certain kinds of jobs, just as the Industrial Revolution eliminated some traditional crafts. During the industrial era, social mechanisms eventually emerged to manage employment arrangements, but the transition was wrenching.
A move into the age of hyperspecialization could prove equally so. How might we address some of the less attractive aspects of hyperspecialization? Currently, a patchwork of regulations, mostly designed for the industrial era, govern work—including hyperspecialized work. Each country or region has its own rules.
If roughly comparable rules were adopted across national boundaries, through either agreed-on company standards or new government regulations, egregious exploitation or deception could be reduced, along with uncertainty for both companies and workers. The goal would be to create the equivalent of a free-trade zone in which workers were protected, companies got the work they needed, and governments collected the appropriate taxes.
Establishing global rules and practices to govern hyperspecialization would be a big challenge. On the other hand, some developing economies may well resist any rules or standards, fearing they would curb growth.
It might be possible to reframe knowledge work undertaken on the web as a form of international trade. Thus global rules for the exchange of knowledge work might create win-win outcomes—much as the loosening of trade restrictions, first under GATT and then under the WTO, has enabled a massive expansion of trade in goods since World War II. Mechanisms are needed for hyperspecialized workers to develop skills over time and to transfer their work records from one intermediary to another.
Those who operate online from home may also want to connect with peers to share war stories or simply to vent. In prior writings we have called for the rise of a new form of guilds to provide the dispersed digital 21st-century workforce with professional development and a sense of community. The New York—based Freelancers Union and other independent-worker organizations have emerged to help fill this void; hyperspecialization intermediaries could do so as well. Medical specialists, for instance, often focus on very narrow aspects of keeping people healthy but continue to find their work rewarding.
And unlike specialized workers in a factory, who do the same tasks all day, digital hyperspecialists can easily construct personal portfolios of tasks. An engineer, for instance, might spend part of a day working on a difficult challenge for InnoCentive and then relax by doing some less demanding work on Mechanical Turk.
No discussion of the future of knowledge work should neglect to mention artificial intelligence, whereby computers take over tasks formerly performed by people. One recent example is a new generation of software tools that analyze massive amounts of text. Used during the discovery phase of lawsuits, this software can accomplish what young associates at law firms once did by laboriously reading box after box of documents.
In the future some first-generation hyperspecialization initiatives will become viable candidates for pure automation. In many other areas artificial intelligence will enable or augment hyperspecialization, by automating some tasks or managing portions of the process.
Given the march of technology, firms that want to take advantage of hyperspecialization should continually monitor the potential for fully automating certain knowledge work. Hyperspecialization is the human cousin of the information technology tools that have become available to businesses over the past few decades.
When workers are trained to perfect one task rather than having to handle a host of tasks, they tend to master the one task quickly and become far more efficient. When workers are efficient, they are also productive, so one of the major benefits of specialization is that it frees your employees to focus on doing one thing and doing that thing well. That, in turn, leads to better productivity because you don't have to spend time and money training your bicycle designer how to make the bicycles, and you don't have to spend time and money teaching your bicycle maker how to design bicycles.
So let us look at them below:. Without the division of labor, mastery of a skill takes much longer. This is because a workers attention is spread across many areas. For instance, it would be difficult to master a language if you are also trying to learn the piano, engineering, CSS, and economics.
So, the division of labor allows the worker to focus and master a specific part of the process, which helps them learn it faster. When a firm employs a new worker, it is far quicker to train them if they can focus on a specific task. For instance, an employee at a car manufacturing plant will be more efficient if they focused on fitting the wheels on, rather than the doors, the steering wheel, etc. Some industries have a higher turnover rate than others. The division of labor allows new employees to come in and easily replace lost workers.
Instead of taking 12 months to become efficient in a role, it may take 3 months. This reduces the impact of losing a worker. For instance, a worker that has learnt how to make a pin from start to finish also takes away their skills and expertise. To replace that worker will require months, if not years of training and experience. By contrast, if a worker who makes the head of the pin leaves, an incoming employee has far less to learn and master. To put it another way; it is more efficient to replace a piece of the puzzle, than the entire puzzle.
When workers focus solely on a specific task, they can master it quicker and more efficiently. In turn, workers become more productive. By allowing workers pure focus on one task, their attentions are not diverted. The reason productivity increases is partially due to a greater level of mastery. However, it is also a by-product of several other advantages. For instance, it allows workers to flow to areas where they are best suited.
Some employees may be better suited to dealing and manipulating data, whilst others are better at managing people and projects.
When we say allocation of workers, we refer to their role within the production process. For instance, what may just be a one stage process could become a five-stage one.
This creates five separate and unique roles, each with a different task. If we look to large corporations, they have departments for finance, IT, human resources, and marketing, among others. The division of labor allows employees to specialise. This is efficient because those who are well suited to an IT role will not be so well suited to a human resources role. There are specific skills that are not necessarily well transferred to specific tasks.
From a training standpoint alone, this is immediately impractical, as the necessary knowledge and skills would likely take years to impart.
There would also be inefficiencies connected with creating a work station for a single car builder and time lost moving the car and worker between work stations for various tasks.
Instead, the job of building a car is broken out into sequential components, and these small, specific jobs are given to a single worker or group of workers. Instead of completing all tasks, a worker may now only place a single fender, for example, on every vehicle that comes through her workstation.
The range of knowledge and skill ensures fast training and comparatively short times to gain expertise. The limited and repetitive nature of the subtasks a single worker undertakes may prove boring and lead to distraction and low productivity.
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