Performance. Measures of Life - Metaphysical Labour Flexibility, Performance and Commitment in

Introduction

Fig. 2: The question on the wall.

The question ‘what is work?’ is written on the wall. “When I’m off /I think about my work/ When I work / I think about when I’m off / I wish I could work /in my spare time.” This issue has been raised within the literature on work-life balance as the blurring of the boundaries between work and non-work (e.g. Kanter, 1977; Lewis, 2003a; 2003b; Lopata and Norr, 1980). The blurring of boundaries has been discussed in different ways. The structural form argues that work is not determined by a specific place and time because the employees can work from home and work outside office hours (Hill et al., 2003). This form is closely related to the technological form of blurred boundaries that says that technological development such as PDAs, cell phones and the internet enables the employees to work everywhere and anytime (Golden and Geisler, 2007; Hill et al., 1998). In the psychological form of blurred boundaries the employees

Chapter VI: Performance. Measures of Life

Introduction

Fig. 2: The question on the wall.

have to separate personal matters and emotions from the management of work. Work demands that the employees are emotionally involved which, on the one hand, means that distinguishing between being a private person and an employee, and on the other that the employees having to be aware of and make a distinction between their private and professional emotions (Herlihy, 2000; Hochschild, 2003). Finally, there is the productivity form of blurred boundaries. In this form the boundaries between production and social reproduction are what become blurred. Hochschild (2000) has famously argued that there is a reversal of the spheres of production and reproduction, so entertainment, leisure and education have become a part of work while “home has become the place where people carry out necessary tasks efficiently in the limited amount of time allotted” (49). The distinction between productive and reproductive is thought of as the institutional difference between work and family (e.g. McDowell, 2004). Hence it has been dealt with in terms of conflicting identity (parent vs. career), time (work time vs. family time), and place (work vs. home). As the division between work and non-work is no longer determined by a given place and time it has to be constituted by the individual employees themselves. This is also known as boundary management that emphasizes that the employees draw the boundary between work and non-work by deciding upon where and when to work (Clark, 2000; Kossek et al., 2006;

Nippert-Eng, 1996; Perlow, 1998).

The chapter expands on the theoretical developments of boundary management and the productive form of blurred boundaries by suggesting that the employees not only have to draw the spatial and temporal line between work and non-work, they also have to determine reproduction as what makes them able to be productive. Managing the boundary between work and non-work becomes a part of self-management in the sense that the employees themselves have to determine whether something is work or not work. Furthermore, it becomes a part of the employees’ self-management to manage the relationship between their production and reproduction, e.g. the employees have to manage their contemporary level of production in relation to how it affects their general wellbeing and future ability to be productive.

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Hence, the chapter develops a new perspective on the management of work-life balance by examining how conditions for balance between work and domestic life are affected by changes in the measurement of employee productivity. It is argued that performance as a measure of individual productivity makes the conditions of employment negotiable;

they change and cannot be determined independently of the self-management of the employee. This is because measures of work in performance management are dependent on how the individual employees manage the relationship between productivity and well-being.

The chapter is based on an empirical study of the multinational company Red that employees 2000 people in Denmark. Seven focus group interviews involving twenty-five employees and ten managers from the finance and R&D departments were conducted over a period of two months. Red is one of the frontrunners in Denmark within the area of implementing new forms of work-life benefits for employees. In fact they recently won a national work-life balance prize. Red has put a lot of organizational resources in the development of a variety of life initiatives to support the work-life balance of its employees. These initiatives include among others flexible working schedules, part-time work, teleworking, up to twelve months paid maternity leave and six months paid paternity leave, and the development of a company health care centre.

On a strategic level, Red has developed a strategic life-cycle approach to work-life balance, which had to be practically implemented as an intranet-based online ‘tool box’.

Here managers and employees can find useful information regarding work-life balance issues and company policies in different stages of life. Furthermore, work-life balance is also on the agenda in the appraisal interviews that managers and employees have every six months. In the interview, general problems and issues relating to work-family conflict can be discussed.

In the first section of the chapter it is argued that performance management on a general analytical level changes the measurement of employee productivity, which implies that the employees have to be able to manage between being productive and being socially reproductive. Moreover, it is discussed how performance management works by controlling and creating the subjective processes of the employees and why appraisal

On a strategic level, Red has developed a strategic life-cycle approach to work-life balance, which had to be practically implemented as an intranet-based online ‘tool box’.

interviews provide the organizational setting for discussion of work-life balance between manager and employee. The following section describes the research site and research methods. Then the chapter analyses empirically how the employees in Red find it difficult to define what work is in terms of working time and working place and instead invoke a variety of individual rules to determine whether something should be regarded as work or not work. They can no longer define or measure work in terms of pre-established working hours and working place. Instead, they themselves have to decide and define what work is. In the following section, these results are discussed in relation to how they can be dealt with in the performance appraisal interview. The chapter returns to the idea that life is the measure of work in the conclusion. Work-life balance is about how life becomes productive in work and this is the question that employees and managers should address in the performance appraisal interview.

Measurement of Work

The introduction of new ways of measuring work, like management by objectives (Drucker, 2006) and later performance management (e.g. Armstrong, 2000; Armstrong and Baron, 1998) has not only changed the nature of work, it has also affected the control and management of human subjectivity which, as a productive asset, is no longer measured in terms of input (time and energy) but rather in terms of output (performance).

This change in the measurement work affects the measure from given categories of time and energy put into work towards variable or open categories of performance that can be discussed. It is not only the employees input in work that can be negotiated in performance management, but also the objectives that the employees should obtain.

How something is determined as work changes radically because performance management is a different technique for measuring work and forms another way of knowing and seeing productivity than, say, scientific management.

This change in the nature of work affects work-life balance because there is no longer a clear cut distinction between the production of work and, for example, in the family reproduction working time and working place. The employees’ work-life balance

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depends not only on their ability to do boundary management but also on the ability to manage and balance the relationship between production and reproduction, e.g. the employees have to manage the relationship between the production and reproduction of their subjectivity in relation to how it affects their general wellbeing and future ability to be productive. Performance management is a technology to measure the performance of employees; however, it can also be described more generally as a paradigm of measuring work (see also McKenzie, 2001). It is the latter case that is of interest here.

Performance management is a different paradigm of measuring work than scientific management.

Work is valorised in a different way as performance management replaces the time clocks of scientific management. Time and energy have been the traditional measures of work. For example, in scientific management work is measured in terms of how much energy the employees put into work, e.g. how much energy the employees put into shovelling, and by measuring the time they spend on a certain work task (Taylor, 1967:

55). Time is the source of wealth, which leads to a division of time into company time and private time (Clegg and Dunkerly, 1980; see also Fleming and Spicer, 2004: 78). In performance management time is not a measure of work. Michael Armstrong defines performance appraisal as “a process of systematically evaluating performance and providing feedback on which performance adjustments can be made” (2000: 71). Thus it is necessary that the employees participate in the evaluation process by negotiating and setting objectives as the standard of measures for performance in collaboration with the management (e.g. Baiman and Evans, 1983: 371). It is a two-way process. The employees take part in settling the measures for their own performance and this in turn implies that the setting of standards of measures is not external to the employees. The employees are involved in defining their own job criteria. By this means, job criteria are individualized and can be negotiated and adjusted according to how hard or easy it is for the employees to obtain the objectives.

In this sense, performance management works by controlling and creating the subjective processes of the employees

Performance management is a different paradigm of measuring work than scientific management.

In this sense, performance management works by controlling and creating the subjective processes of the employees

As it is no longer possible to confine subjectivity merely to tasks of execution, it becomes necessary for the subject’s competence in the areas of management, communication and creativity to be made compatible with the conditions of ‘production for production’s sake’.

(Lazzarato, 1996: 135)

In performance management the measure can only be determined in relation to the subjectivity of the employees. Improvement of productivity does not relate to the employees in the workplace but relates directly to the employees themselves (Harney, 2005: 585). They have to take part in settling the objectives that their performance is measured against. Performance management addresses the employees’ conditions of employment in an ongoing negotiation of standards of measures. Hereby, the performance appraisal interview can be said to focus on the employees’ subjectivity and relation to themselves in the way in which it evaluates and manages work.

The evaluation in the appraisal interview is always a self-evaluation. Barbara Townley’s analysis of the performance appraisal interview as examination and confession techniques can be read alongside this argument (1993: 206; see also Andersen, 2007:

333) following Michel Foucault’s analysis of technologies of the self (e.g. 1988). This feature of performance appraisal interviews will not be emphasized here, however; the focus will not only be on how performance management works by controlling the subjective processes of the employees, but also how these processes affect the relation of work and life. For example, it is employee subjectivity that is controlled when the appraisal interviews address the kind of objectives the employees might commit themselves to in the future, when the employees talk about their competencies gap, when they speak about their personal dreams, aspirations and thoughts, and not least when they talk about their personal life in forms of stress, work/family conflict and work-life balance.

How do the changes of performance management affect the employees’ conditions to achieve work-life balance? When measures such as time and energy are replaced by performance there is no longer a given or institutional division between the spheres of

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work and family. From this perspective it is not possible for the employee to leave work at the office because the employees’ creation of value depends more on how the employees live and who they are than the specific place and time of work. In other words, it becomes difficult for the employees to distinguish work and family in terms of different identities, times and places. This implies that the form of measurement in performance management imposes a certain form of self-management on the employees, because they have to be able to oscillate between work and non-work, i.e. achieve work-life balance. Traditionally, this has been interpreted as boundary management (e.g.

“work is something between 9 and 5”, “work is something I do at the office”, “I’m aware of being a father when I’m together with my children”), but I will argue that boundary management is based on the individual rules for productivity that are settled by the individual employees (e.g. “should I consider this activity work?”, “does this activity contribute to my performance?”). Hence we have to understand boundary management from the perspective of individual rules for productivity. This latter perspective demands that the employees have to been critical of their own performance.

The critical aspect is twofold; first, they have to express what is good and bad in their performance and second, they have to express the productivity condition on which they constitute and regulate themselves. That is, what are their individual criteria for productivity (“what makes me productive?”)? Hence, this implies that these kinds of rules of productivity are not only self-judgemental but furthermore reflective judgement, because they are without a pre-given rule (Smith, 2003a). The employees have to establish their own rules of productivity, which is the sense in which employees can be said to be autonomous today. In this sense, judgements have to be created in the absence of rules (Smith, 2003a: 316; Deleuze, 2005: 1). Put differently, it is not possible to define whether employees have done a great job in the performance management system by referring to already established rules of judgement, which can valorise the performance of the employees in advance of the employees’ action or by referring to the energy and time that they have put into work.

This is the sense in which performance management controls subjectivity; it demands that the employees develop principles (e.g. individual job criteria) on which the evaluation of their individual performance can be evaluated. This means that we cannot

understand these rules as abstract or outside of the way in which the employees regulate themselves as self-managing. In this sense, we should rather speak of evaluations that

“are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge” (Deleuze, 2005: 1).

Evaluation, that is, is not based on pre-established values; rather, these values are established in the evaluation. For example, the objectives can be continuously adjusted according to how hard or easy they are to achieve for the employees, and adjusted to general changes in the job situation (e.g. organizational changes, project members or managers leave the company, changes in market).

The evaluation is first and foremost a self-evaluation of the employees (e.g. Armstrong, 2000: 73-4). They have to create these principles on which they can relate to themselves as individuals with certain values that can govern and regulate their actions and subjectivity. The employees create a form of entrepreneurial self because they have to create their own principles on which their performances as human subjects are judged (see also du Gay, 2000; Jones and Spicer, 2005; Rose, 1999). These principles as individual rules of productivity function beside and to some extent replace the general working conditions or conditions of employment. To provide an example, several of the employees said that they worked overtime or extra hours, but they were not told by any managers or colleagues to do so. It was not a rule established by the management which they found they should oblige; rather, they established these different rules to express their individual way of being productive. In relation to work-life balance this is exactly crucial because it implies that the rules of production and work cannot be separated from the constitution of their subjectivity. In other words, the measurement of work is exactly a performative judgement because it is not possible to separate the action of constitution of a certain subjectivity from the enunciation of it (Deleuze and Guattari, 1999: 77). For example, the pronouncement of the words ‘I do’ at a wedding change the whole subjectivity of a person from being a bachelor to being married.

Hereby, it is not possible to describe the individual rules of productivity in general and collective terms as it is possible with the employees’ conditions of employment. The reason for this is that it is the employees themselves that invent these rules. They are

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