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How to Develop a Terrible Workforce

Posted on Oct 15, 2023, jshell55

In the spirit of Deming, we’re going to take on the project of workforce development, namely how to develop a terrible workforce. Deming, as I reminded you recently, says that a system is perfectly engineered to produce what it does. So if the system has already produced a workforce that doesn’t show up for work, is illiterate and untrainable, can’t do creative problem solving and when they do show up they’re drunk or high, it should be easy to figure out how we, as a society, managed to do this.

Why Does This Matter

Well, an essential element in people not doing their jobs is a workforce, at all levels, who do the opposite of all of those things. We’re not really asking for rocket science, unless, of course, we need to make rockets.

Who am I to be telling you this?

For the past decade or more, I’ve been auditing the HR process in more than 500 companies, at the Fortune 500 level as well as family businesses, consulting companies and everything in between. Attracting, hiring, training, and developing functioning workforce is an essential part of all of this.

At the same time, I’ve witnessed many hundred examples of workplace terribleness. So, as a Quality Systems person, I derive a nice revenue source from fixing the end results.

www.jimshell.com/quality-systems-training/

Basic Assumptions

I guess we should have spent some time on this in the introduction.

Our focus in this literary effort is capitalistic. It assumes that we’re working on managing some kind of economic entity. The extreme example is a giant manufacturing plant, with 5000 or more employees, and the other extreme example is the ice cream place down at the strip mall, with a handful of employees.

In any of these cases, there is typically a labor force, and a management activity that somehow has to assemble more than one person to do useful work.

We, as a species, started to need this kind of organization a long time ago. I will leave it to you to come up with the date of the first workforce, and figure out how long ago the first workplace screwup was. Archaeologists of today are questioning everything we’ve “learned” about civilization.

What we are primarily interested in is the kind of workforce that we’ve needed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. We’re skipping over the apprentice system, and the system of specialized workers, that apparently started, ironically, at about the same time beer was invented. There’s no doubt that the ancient people must have figured out various ways to do this as well.

We can study those societies later.

The Age of Enlightenment and Horace Mann

For further background information you might want to look at this as well. The Age of Enlightenment happened over a period of a couple of centuries, and started mainly in Europe.

It basically was a set of attitudes centered on human happiness, decision making based on reason, separation of Church and State, and other aspects of civilization that helped things to function.

norace man, the father of not developing a terrible workforce

The people we call the “founding fathers” of the USA were all disciples of this, and the basic concepts have spread widely, but not everywhere. Some people would prefer not to be “enlightened.” They valued education, but not enough to make it a human right.

As it applied to the Industrial Revolution, it became pretty obvious that we, as a society, could make our industry more efficient if we had a way to do “workforce development.” The leading proponent of this in the USA was a character, Horace Mann, who felt like it was the government’s job to finance this system.

The intent of this system was to have a standardized way of screening to keep out the riff raff. He arranged the classrooms in a way that resembled a sweatshop, inflicted punishment, and otherwise got people ready for factory life. At the time, that was considered a good thing and the first “students” were the little mill girls who were indoctrinated into the system.

In the rural areas, which most of the country was at that point, the curriculum was adjusted to meet the needs of that community.

Problems with This Plan

There were several underlying problems with this plan. It was, in its way, brutal, it did not adapt to individual learning styles, and most of all, we couldn’t, and still can’t, come to agreement on what it means to be “educated.”

This was a special hot potato in the areas of the country that still had slavery. In those areas, there was an underlying hostility toward people paying taxes so that other peoples’ kids could get an education. This also trickles down to today.

The System in 1960

I am using this as a proposed year for the ultimate expression of this system.This was the era of the nice schoolhouse, full of baby boomers. They sat in the corner or did detention if they acted up. There was a flag in the front, and a stern Principal, and a board of education, which inflicted corporal punishment. You got a report card, which you were expected to show your parents, and for the most part, they expected competence.

They knew at the time that the model was not equally good for everybody so there was shop class and auto mechanics. When you got a diploma, it actually meant that you tolerated 12 years of the system. The kids that were going to college were picked out, and everybody knew their place in the social dominance hierarchy..

The parents tended to support the system, even though it had its nuances. If you were sure your little boy or girl was college material, there were alternate paths through the system.. Was there bullying, discrimination, people acting badly? Yes there was. The system was far from perfect.

Across the southeast schools were gradually being desegregated. for what that is worth. Segregation was made illegal in 1955 but it took 20 years for some of these places to get the message. We found out the other day that in Louisville, which is pretty far north, it only happened in 1975. That is a can of worms. We will never know what human potential was lost because of this. Some of these places are just as badly segregated now as they were at the time.

louisville buses its future terrible workforce to underachieving schools

Did any of this Help?

Did it help produce a better workforce? There is lack of agreement on that topic.

The product of this whole process, the labor force circa 1960, was perfectly capable of stepping into a work situation. They were also perfectly capable of packing an M-16 into a rice paddy, because these “skills” which included following orders and not making waves are also beneficial for the military.

The Horace Mann system was also invented based on the Prussian system, which was all about providing cannon fodder for that lovely country’s many ongoing wars.

1974 was the maximum year of everything in the US. Since that time, the inflation-adjusted per capita income in the country has gone down for the bottom ⅔ of the population. There were some signs of instability in the few years before or after that. There is a statistical link below, the peak was “percentage of the population completing high school”, although we will not be able to agree whether these kids learned anything special. The peak of that was 1974.

Anyway, now it is now. We can go into history if you want but that is the origin story.

How to Develop a Terrible Workforce: Early Childhood Development

If we are to begin a project to create the least effective workforce possible, we have to start early. We have to deprive infants and babies of nutrition, motherly care, and a safe environment.

There is a statistical correlation between breastfeeding and IQ, so I suppose we would do away with that. However, part of breastfeeding is to have a present mother, rather than one who dumps the infant off in day care to do her low wage job, so there is not necessarily causation.

Side point: The difference between causation and correlation, by the way, is an important idea that we should avoid teaching at all, if we are going to develop a workforce without critical thinking skills.

We should expose infants to heavy metals. According to some research, these intellect-killing substances are in the water and land, in some places. We should also feed them a steady diet of as much sugar as possible.

We should deprive them of two-parent families. According to the statistics below, 23% of kids are brought up in single parent families. Only about 63% of kids are brought up in homes with both of their biological parents.

Of the kids who spend time with dad, 75% eventually go on to have stable employment, so we’d have to get dad out of the picture. Kids who had fatherhood time are more emotionally stable, and have higher levels of sociability and self control, according to research. I am not saying alternate methods of raising kids is bad, by the way, but these are people who hear the word “no” occasionally.

So if we were to try to cripple the workforce, there should be a lot of anti-dad policies enacted.

School Days

We have to start with the teachers.

I did some time exploring the myth that most teachers in this era come from the bottom third of their college class. There is no real data to back that up. However, there is some IQ data which I have referenced below that says that the typical teacher IQ is 85-115, which means that in reality teachers are no smarter than the so-called “average” employee.

Jordan Peterson has the idea that the US Military will reject people that have IQ under 83, because they are considered untrainable.

There are other references below that suggest that the military doesn’t actually measure IQ but does reject the bottom ⅓ of applicants based on some standardized testing. That being the case, there is a fraction of the population who will be rejected by the US military for being unintelligent, but hired as a school teacher.

So if we were to engineer a system to fail, that would be a good start. Maximize those people. A system of preferentially hiring the unintelligent to be schoolteachers would be perfect.

Teacher Pay

According to the references below, the typical starting pay for a parking lot attendant in Atlanta is $13.60 per hour. The minimum starting pay for an elementary school teacher in Atlanta is $12.50 per hour, but you don’t have to have a college education or a teaching certificate to sit around and attend to peoples’ cars.

So it looks like this system is well on its way to discouraging new teachers, and ensuring that our cars are safe. Barely.

I think the average salary for a baggage handler at the Atlanta Airport is around $15 an hour, but those people have worse hours and have to lift baggage.

To be perfectly fair, the average teacher pay in Atlanta is closer to $60K, but the average engineer pay is $95K. So if you’re bright enough to be an engineer, there is plenty of incentive for you to ditch the idea of being a teacher. Can you predict that your teacher is less smart than an engineer? Maybe so.

Should it matter that 80% of the elementary school teachers are female? Well if we want to maximize the culture shock of having to deal with a male authority figure when the kids start their jobs, we should get it all the way up to 100%.

55% of the teaching force at the moment is ready to quit. 40% of the “regular workforce” at the moment is ready to quit as well, so the incidence is a little higher.

Role of the School

This is a bit of an issue. At some point, the role of the school has evolved. At first, it started to be a place where kids could go to learn content. Now, it has evolved into a multi-level care system. The kids can eat breakfast and lunch there, and a significant portion relies on this as a source of nutrition.

This expanded greatly in 1966, and if you’re below the poverty line the school system will now pay to feed you.

In a lot of areas, there is a school-based mental health system which diagnose and try to treat mental health issues. That also used to be the job of the parents.

There are 2500 school medical clinics throughout the country to detect and diagnose illnesses of one kind or another. That also mainly used to be the job of the parents.

Does anybody think that since these programs were put into place the workforce has gotten better? It is hard to come up with hard data, but it looks like it has mainly kept it from being worse. We still have to tackle the problem of measurements and accountability.

Measurements and Accountability

Well, as Deming would say, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. We as a society still are not completely together on what it means to be educated.

The ideal situation would be one of standardized testing, which had in it a certain amount of content that was deemed central to a productive workforce. Ideally this should be designed by business owners, and include some technical content, communication, basic problem solving, including math, and a student could and should be ranked on the basis of it.

This was actually invented by Horace Mann, but reached its apex in the early 2000’s when “no child left behind” was enacted.

For those wanting to destroy the system, just do away with all of that. Whine because it is biased against poor kids and kids of different cultures. Eliminate test results as a requirement to move on to college. Encourage school systems to cheat, like they did in Atlanta a few years ago.

Then, dumb down the curriculum, and do away with truth telling as it applies to kids. Be sure not to hurt anyone’s feelings. Give everybody a trophy. Teach content so that it is as inoffensive as possible, and have the teachers be a delivery device for the information. Expect them to think as little as possible. Have educational content decided by whichever special interest group is the most vocal at the moment, even if they are a minority in the community.

Don’t have minimal nationwide standards. After all, if a community chooses to raise generation after generation of idiots, it should be allowed to, right?

School Choice

Oh, yeah this is a thing. If you have a select group of “elite” students, make sure to get them out of the system. Send them to “magnet schools” or out of public education altogether. Allow the rest of the kids whose parents can’t afford to truck their kids across town to sink or swim on their own.

Students learning from each other is a trend, by the way, under the supposition that in some statistically predictable percentage of the time, the kids are smarter than the teachers. We can’t have them near the dunderheads who we want to keep helpless.

If you still want to spend tax money on a vast, undereducated population, you can do so. If you’re going to maximize the number of kids that are warehoused in underachieving schools, then remove the smart kids. Make it a culture of mediocrity.

Home schooling? I guess that’s where you opt out of the system entirely and have your mom (usually it’s your mom) “educate” you. How is that working out? Well since we have no way to measure, there’s no way to tell as it applies to its effects on the workforce. There is a reference below that talks all about correlation and causation, which is something a homeschooler might know if their mom knew statistics.

One more thing: If you want to produce a failing workforce, whatever you do, don’t put them on a farm. Farm kids are used to solving problems, work their asses off and integrate into the workforce. If you want to produce a culture of failure, this is the opposite of what you want.

College

We’re not even going to try to figure this out at the moment. The US system of higher education is, in the words of the article below, reviled at home but the envy of the world. But it’s a system where kids are going into massive debt to get credentials in fields of study where they can’t get jobs.

In our project to develop the worst workforce possible, we’ll leave them alone for the moment.

What if some of these kids show up at the factory door looking for work? Your guess is as good as mine. It depends on the kid, I suppose.

How to Change Any of This?

Well, we’re in a bit of a pickle when it comes to changing any sort of system right now.

We’re all trauma survivors when it comes to the medical and pharmaceutical system, aren’t we? Complex systems in this time period can’t be changed without a lot of argument, and there is an army of lobbyists and special interests with handfuls of “campaign contributions” to keep it from being changed.

The same things can be said about the air travel, railroad, corporate governance and food production and delivery systems. They’re practically impossible to change at a high level. Every “tax reform” results in the tax code being even fatter, and the benefits not widely spread out.

So it is with the childhood development and education system. There are constituencies to deal with, including publishers, teachers unions, local government officials, and others who like the system the way it is.

That is one of the definitions of “entrenched mediocrity” that we’re going to explore at some point. There is a system with known deficiencies that can’t be changed, even though we think we can do better.

To change the educational system, as we keep finding out, you have to change the thousands of little local communities who have their own biases and special interests. Any proposed change is likely to be watered down by the political process and eventually deemed silly.

So even if we tried to make it worse, on its own, we’d be hard pressed to find a way to do it. No one is in charge. There’s no button to push.

The End Result

This is the bottom line.

With a lot of work, by tinkering with the system like we suggested above, you could end up with a vast, undereducated workforce. They won’t listen to instruction, they’ll communicate improperly, they won’t show up to work, and blow up and quit over minor issues. You won’t be able to correct them via feedback. They’ll show up to meetings late, have no initiative, always be on the phone and require constant supervision.

They won’t do their jobs.

Can you completely attribute any of this to the educational system? Not without attributing it to the society in general. I guess that’s the point. The system, whether societal or educational, has failed the workforce.