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The Politics of Work and Productivity Standards
ACALIB-01510; No. of pages: 2; 4C: The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
Politics of Academic Libraries
The Politics of Work and Productivity Standards John Buschman Seton Hall University, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 2 May 2014 Accepted 2 May 2014 Available online xxxx
INTRODUCTION Let me say from the outset: a) I fully recognize that an approach that treats a library as if pure inputs produce predictable outputs is not appropriate, productive, or workable—I have gone on record to that effect in my scholarship for a very long time; b) I fully recognize that the benefits of our work are often ephemeral and don't “pay off” immediately—again long on my record as well; and c) that any work and productivity standards are wrapped in contexts and should be sensitively implied—staff work, professional work, administrative work, etc.. But we still have a serious problem in this area. PROBLEMS Recently, a query went out to a listserv in our field (I will redact identifying information as a courtesy): “[I]s there an average expectation of the [amount of work] per hour [done] by the … team?” Two dispiriting replies came back: 1) “I'll be interested to hear if anyone has kept track of average times (and impressed if [anyone] can do [that many] in an hour!). But of course this depends on the nature of the [work]. Recently I [did several items] in under an hour [but for others] I wound up spending nearly four hours on them. If anyone expected [more of] me … I'd be unemployed very quickly.” 2) “This is a very tricky question. I've got all kinds of stats on how much work we do per day (which varies) that could be broken down to a per-hour rate, but isolating it … per hour is sketchy. … [T]he process can go very quickly … or it can be a nightmare….” In other words, for this particular (and very common library) function/service/operation, in 2014 we in the field don't have a reasonable and defensible standard of productivity and output even over the
course of months or a semester or a year at the staff level. In fact, we struggle with this basic function of guiding our work and our institutions seemingly across the board. Politically, it is hard to claim expertise when everything is “tricky” or varies or is simply not tracked. We simply end up saying the indefensible: we're in charge, but we can't/won't/ don't know how to set work standards. The legitimate question will (and should) come back from a manager or board or provost: then how do you know when you are successful, and how can you make judgments about who/how/where to improve? This is not a new situation at all. Back in 2007 my former colleague (and Dean) Chick Chickering and I published the results of our search for staff copy cataloging benchmark expectations when we were trying to set a reasonable standard at the time. We found that: Cataloging productivity has been notoriously difficult to measure. This is borne out by the fact that, while enough has been written to produce two bibliographies on the subject (in 1970 and 1988—and more since), the vast majority of this work “is fragmentary, limited in scope, and short on detail.” The research is near-impossible to replicate because it is based on locally produced (and undefined) data, it is focused often on the productivity of individuals in a local circumstance, and it is frequently cast in terms of costs and benefits where costs are often difficult to define and measure and thoroughly monetizing the benefits of libraries has been largely absent. The issue has frequently boiled down to the “allegorical battle between Quantity and Quality” with much room for posturing over needs for justification from management and the indignant reply of placing monetary value on such a thing. Hence productivity data is “scanty” and tends to focus on turnaround time—a measure itself going back thirty years in ARL libraries. [N]o national standards or benchmarks were discovered in a series of standard library school texts—current and retrospective—on cataloging relevant to an academic context. … Kohl pulled together relevant studies over twenty years ago and found interesting data on hit rates and the quality of cataloging copy available, but no productivity benchmarks. Charbonneau produced a recent overview of the situation, and confirmed this observing that “no blanket benchmark exists that can refer to all catalogers or groups of catalogers. The process becomes one of establishing individual benchmarks based on each cataloger's responsibilities and situation.” [A] survey … of 27 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) members [found that] “Since data on costs are not necessarily comparable among institutions, other quantifiable measures of efficiency and effectiveness would enhance managerial decision-making” (citations omitted http:// www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/buschman-chickering.htm).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.05.002 0099-1333/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Buschman, J., The Politics of Work and Productivity Standards, The Journal of Academic Librarianship (2014), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.05.002
2
J. Buschman / The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx
A quick check of the dates contained within our original text reveals that librarians have been wringing their hands over this since at least the 1960s. And, this state of affairs is not limited to our technical processes. I wrote about another work situation: From the beginning, [previous] managers failed to provide and enforce certain standards. … [This was an employee who, over the years] first, … repeatedly failed to complete basic … tasks. [T]he employee would claim that s/he forgot/did not understand/had never been shown how to shelve current periodicals, un-jam a copier or reader/printer or check in an item. [T]he supervisor [repeatedly] had to remind this employee to shelve materials, security-strip periodicals, and abide by … schedules. Second, the employee would conduct personal business at the circulation desk … keep[ing] students waiting while s/he composed e-mails, drew comics, placed personal calls and surfed the Internet. … [We] were later surprised to find that the employee had re-installed … software and in fact was running a small Internet business from [a work] computer. Third, the employee harassed students to leave the library early so that the employee could leave before closing hour [by] cut[ting] power to lights, computers, copiers and printers. As a result, students would lose hours of labor and would be unable to print or copy their work. … For years … the employee worked without supervision. An unsupervised problem … remains undocumented, and without documentation a problem is hearsay. [P]rior supervisors and HR administrators avoided formal discipline [and an] undocumented “talking to” was the usual choice, if indeed any action was taken. Clearly, this approach convinced the employee that the library … would, in the end, never embark on formal discipline—or make it stick (http:// ala-apa.org/newsletter/2007/02/17/ignored-too-long/).
TOWARDS SOLUTIONS I wrote at the outset that I fully acknowledged the nuances and the need to do this sensitively, but I also contend firmly that there are such things as reasonable and actionable work and productivity standards and it should not be left up to a Justice Potter Stewart-type definition of pornography (“I know it when I see it”). That represents a serious political problem for us in positioning our institutions and making the argument for their place on campus. When Chick Chickering and I were at work on the cataloging productivity situation, we noted that “cost studies contained a wealth of data on cataloging and time spent on cataloging [and] this would prove valuable” to us. Essentially (without going through our whole process), the really large studies told us how many
records had been handled or altered by those libraries' cataloging staff, and how many staff positions and person-hours went into that work. Applying some standard rules-of-thumb in university employment (vacation days, attendance rates, holidays), we could come up with an expectation of how many records were handled or altered per person over the time period. In other words, ours was an aggregated expectation that could give a rough guide to work output per person over a reasonable amount of time—and then we could account for degree of difficulty or the ups and downs of a schedule, etc.. There is simply no reason we cannot come up with a broad measure like this for most of our work areas. This data would help us manage and judge, it would set fair performance guidelines, and it would be at least a minimum baseline in discussions about what it takes to make libraries run well. “On the Circulation employee, my managers began to carefully document…. The numbers [were] dizzying: on 61 occasions the employee received memos or emails cautioning him/her to amend behavior. The employee was informally reprimanded 24 times, and in addition received seven formal warnings. These formal warnings advised the employee that continued poor performance would result in formal discipline. Each warning was conveyed in writing and orally in meetings with union representation present and all stated that, without sustained improvement, the administration would proceed further down the formal disciplinary process, a process ending in termination. Formal discipline commenced over the course of two years [and ended in dismissal, with the union stating that] … ‘there is no dispute that [the employee] must consistently follow procedures … and complete the work in a timely manner,’ and that … library administrators were ‘open, honest, and followed procedures.’” For librarians, competently handling database interfaces, instructional methods, presentation softwares, web interfaces and their protocols (for subject guides as an instance), liaison contacts, collections development, industry standards in resource description, handling, and accounting, etc.—are all uncontroversial and a standard part of keeping up. Within this of course, there is plenty of room for debate about purposes and outcomes and the needs of our users—above all, our users. But where librarianship is and what a librarian does within that context is ours to articulate. None of these are draconian—on either the staff or professional levels. Putting them in place probably rattles some of us, but not to do so is to accept that we will take more from those willing to work well and hard, and expect less from those who will not, and in the end that is both organizationally and politically corrosive.
Please cite this article as: Buschman, J., The Politics of Work and Productivity Standards, The Journal of Academic Librarianship (2014), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.05.002
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
Politics of Academic Libraries
The Politics of Work and Productivity Standards John Buschman Seton Hall University, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 2 May 2014 Accepted 2 May 2014 Available online xxxx
INTRODUCTION Let me say from the outset: a) I fully recognize that an approach that treats a library as if pure inputs produce predictable outputs is not appropriate, productive, or workable—I have gone on record to that effect in my scholarship for a very long time; b) I fully recognize that the benefits of our work are often ephemeral and don't “pay off” immediately—again long on my record as well; and c) that any work and productivity standards are wrapped in contexts and should be sensitively implied—staff work, professional work, administrative work, etc.. But we still have a serious problem in this area. PROBLEMS Recently, a query went out to a listserv in our field (I will redact identifying information as a courtesy): “[I]s there an average expectation of the [amount of work] per hour [done] by the … team?” Two dispiriting replies came back: 1) “I'll be interested to hear if anyone has kept track of average times (and impressed if [anyone] can do [that many] in an hour!). But of course this depends on the nature of the [work]. Recently I [did several items] in under an hour [but for others] I wound up spending nearly four hours on them. If anyone expected [more of] me … I'd be unemployed very quickly.” 2) “This is a very tricky question. I've got all kinds of stats on how much work we do per day (which varies) that could be broken down to a per-hour rate, but isolating it … per hour is sketchy. … [T]he process can go very quickly … or it can be a nightmare….” In other words, for this particular (and very common library) function/service/operation, in 2014 we in the field don't have a reasonable and defensible standard of productivity and output even over the
course of months or a semester or a year at the staff level. In fact, we struggle with this basic function of guiding our work and our institutions seemingly across the board. Politically, it is hard to claim expertise when everything is “tricky” or varies or is simply not tracked. We simply end up saying the indefensible: we're in charge, but we can't/won't/ don't know how to set work standards. The legitimate question will (and should) come back from a manager or board or provost: then how do you know when you are successful, and how can you make judgments about who/how/where to improve? This is not a new situation at all. Back in 2007 my former colleague (and Dean) Chick Chickering and I published the results of our search for staff copy cataloging benchmark expectations when we were trying to set a reasonable standard at the time. We found that: Cataloging productivity has been notoriously difficult to measure. This is borne out by the fact that, while enough has been written to produce two bibliographies on the subject (in 1970 and 1988—and more since), the vast majority of this work “is fragmentary, limited in scope, and short on detail.” The research is near-impossible to replicate because it is based on locally produced (and undefined) data, it is focused often on the productivity of individuals in a local circumstance, and it is frequently cast in terms of costs and benefits where costs are often difficult to define and measure and thoroughly monetizing the benefits of libraries has been largely absent. The issue has frequently boiled down to the “allegorical battle between Quantity and Quality” with much room for posturing over needs for justification from management and the indignant reply of placing monetary value on such a thing. Hence productivity data is “scanty” and tends to focus on turnaround time—a measure itself going back thirty years in ARL libraries. [N]o national standards or benchmarks were discovered in a series of standard library school texts—current and retrospective—on cataloging relevant to an academic context. … Kohl pulled together relevant studies over twenty years ago and found interesting data on hit rates and the quality of cataloging copy available, but no productivity benchmarks. Charbonneau produced a recent overview of the situation, and confirmed this observing that “no blanket benchmark exists that can refer to all catalogers or groups of catalogers. The process becomes one of establishing individual benchmarks based on each cataloger's responsibilities and situation.” [A] survey … of 27 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) members [found that] “Since data on costs are not necessarily comparable among institutions, other quantifiable measures of efficiency and effectiveness would enhance managerial decision-making” (citations omitted http:// www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/buschman-chickering.htm).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.05.002 0099-1333/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Buschman, J., The Politics of Work and Productivity Standards, The Journal of Academic Librarianship (2014), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.05.002
2
J. Buschman / The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx
A quick check of the dates contained within our original text reveals that librarians have been wringing their hands over this since at least the 1960s. And, this state of affairs is not limited to our technical processes. I wrote about another work situation: From the beginning, [previous] managers failed to provide and enforce certain standards. … [This was an employee who, over the years] first, … repeatedly failed to complete basic … tasks. [T]he employee would claim that s/he forgot/did not understand/had never been shown how to shelve current periodicals, un-jam a copier or reader/printer or check in an item. [T]he supervisor [repeatedly] had to remind this employee to shelve materials, security-strip periodicals, and abide by … schedules. Second, the employee would conduct personal business at the circulation desk … keep[ing] students waiting while s/he composed e-mails, drew comics, placed personal calls and surfed the Internet. … [We] were later surprised to find that the employee had re-installed … software and in fact was running a small Internet business from [a work] computer. Third, the employee harassed students to leave the library early so that the employee could leave before closing hour [by] cut[ting] power to lights, computers, copiers and printers. As a result, students would lose hours of labor and would be unable to print or copy their work. … For years … the employee worked without supervision. An unsupervised problem … remains undocumented, and without documentation a problem is hearsay. [P]rior supervisors and HR administrators avoided formal discipline [and an] undocumented “talking to” was the usual choice, if indeed any action was taken. Clearly, this approach convinced the employee that the library … would, in the end, never embark on formal discipline—or make it stick (http:// ala-apa.org/newsletter/2007/02/17/ignored-too-long/).
TOWARDS SOLUTIONS I wrote at the outset that I fully acknowledged the nuances and the need to do this sensitively, but I also contend firmly that there are such things as reasonable and actionable work and productivity standards and it should not be left up to a Justice Potter Stewart-type definition of pornography (“I know it when I see it”). That represents a serious political problem for us in positioning our institutions and making the argument for their place on campus. When Chick Chickering and I were at work on the cataloging productivity situation, we noted that “cost studies contained a wealth of data on cataloging and time spent on cataloging [and] this would prove valuable” to us. Essentially (without going through our whole process), the really large studies told us how many
records had been handled or altered by those libraries' cataloging staff, and how many staff positions and person-hours went into that work. Applying some standard rules-of-thumb in university employment (vacation days, attendance rates, holidays), we could come up with an expectation of how many records were handled or altered per person over the time period. In other words, ours was an aggregated expectation that could give a rough guide to work output per person over a reasonable amount of time—and then we could account for degree of difficulty or the ups and downs of a schedule, etc.. There is simply no reason we cannot come up with a broad measure like this for most of our work areas. This data would help us manage and judge, it would set fair performance guidelines, and it would be at least a minimum baseline in discussions about what it takes to make libraries run well. “On the Circulation employee, my managers began to carefully document…. The numbers [were] dizzying: on 61 occasions the employee received memos or emails cautioning him/her to amend behavior. The employee was informally reprimanded 24 times, and in addition received seven formal warnings. These formal warnings advised the employee that continued poor performance would result in formal discipline. Each warning was conveyed in writing and orally in meetings with union representation present and all stated that, without sustained improvement, the administration would proceed further down the formal disciplinary process, a process ending in termination. Formal discipline commenced over the course of two years [and ended in dismissal, with the union stating that] … ‘there is no dispute that [the employee] must consistently follow procedures … and complete the work in a timely manner,’ and that … library administrators were ‘open, honest, and followed procedures.’” For librarians, competently handling database interfaces, instructional methods, presentation softwares, web interfaces and their protocols (for subject guides as an instance), liaison contacts, collections development, industry standards in resource description, handling, and accounting, etc.—are all uncontroversial and a standard part of keeping up. Within this of course, there is plenty of room for debate about purposes and outcomes and the needs of our users—above all, our users. But where librarianship is and what a librarian does within that context is ours to articulate. None of these are draconian—on either the staff or professional levels. Putting them in place probably rattles some of us, but not to do so is to accept that we will take more from those willing to work well and hard, and expect less from those who will not, and in the end that is both organizationally and politically corrosive.
Please cite this article as: Buschman, J., The Politics of Work and Productivity Standards, The Journal of Academic Librarianship (2014), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.05.002