Mad Deskillings

Hip-hop performers are sometimes said to have “mad skills,” and this is a good thing. I’m hearing about what might be called “mad deskilling.”

It is not a good thing.

More often in global outsourcing these days the rather artless (literally) words deskill and deskilling are being bandied about. The dictionary defines deskilling as “the elimination of the need for skilled labor in an industry, especially by the introduction of high technology.” It also refers to the downgrade of a job or occupation from a skilled to a semiskilled or unskilled position.

You can guess how I feel about this. I neither like nor agree with the assertion that jobs can be dumbed down to the point that they can be performed in a piecemeal manner. Performed more efficiently? Sure. But done without any design, master plan or measurement? Absolutely not.

Collaborative work is work done as part of a group. And that means there’s a shared goal or at least a common purpose. As with almost any group activity there is some element of social interaction to the work in addition to the task fulfillment. Trust comes into it.

Again, there are absolutely some work processes that are candidates for simplification and streamlining – to the point that they can be performed by lesser-skilled people. Automation helps.

But if the outsourcing and offshoring industry insists on deskilling work processes as a core strategy for making work portable, how will the aggregate value of process transformation ever come about? And where’s the much ballyhooed value “beyond the scope of work” going to come from in such an environment?

The No. 1 concern we hear today from clients is employee turnover. They view the churn at their service providers as a significant business risk. They’re right. And emphasizing deskilling is part of what’s creating this risk.I believe the workers who make up the global sourcing industry are looking for challenges, not rote tasks. They want to be part of an industry that adds value, not just acts as worker bees optimizing a task to the point of marginal cost.

Beware of the mad deskillings!