Is there operational value in keeping a human workforce in the deskilled labor sector, or are we progressing toward a world of fully machine automated processes?

     FIRST POST! The original idea for this blog was to create a starting point for discussion and entrepreneurial idea generation. For the most part, it consists of my personal take on the situation through excessive and sometimes pointless rambling. 

If you have your own take on the subject at hand, or want to address anything that I have stated please feel free to comment in the section below.

Well, here goes nothing...

 The fact of the matter is, technology is advancing at a near-exponential rate, whether you’d like it to, or not.  Innovations in operational processes have changed the face of what we view as the consumer experience.  The suggestions provided by a clerk at a local video store have been substituted by Netflix’s own recommendation service, which uses algorithms and data trends combined with your own viewing habits to create enjoyable recommendations with exceptional accuracy. The bank teller of years past has been replaced by an ATM, which in some cases has been replaced by a mobile banking application. Simple roles which have previously been fulfilled by humans are slowly working their way towards full automation. Putting the Terminator conspiracy of machines taking over the world aside, is this necessarily a bad thing? In an ideal, utopian world where the unemployment issue doesn't exist, and thus society would not need to cripple itself technologically in order to create jobs, and putting all personal opinions towards technological dependence aside, is there any concrete benefit to maintaining a human work force over a fully automated one?

       Today’s topic will address that question, and conclude with a starting point for generating ideas on how to innovate between McDonaldized & traditional business experiences.

            For the remainder of this discussion, I will use global fast-food behemoth, McDonald’s, as a primary example, seeing as how my original topic of conversation stemmed from a sociology class at the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) about the expansion of McDonaldization and the pitfalls of McJobs. The main argument against McDonaldization, the business focus on efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, is that it promotes the “deskilling” of the laborer. The role of human labor is restricted to so many control systems, so streamlined, and so technologically dependent that it is essentially reducing (or empowering, if you take pride in being able to do things efficiently) the worker into a “human robot.” The job turnover, and the ability to replace employees is so high that some McDonald’s chains (particularly in regions of Europe) have installed Easy-Order kiosks with credit-card readers to replace the job of the traditional cashier. Some people (primarily Marxist thinkers) view the act of deskilling the laborer as a method of exploiting the lower-class worker, but if the wages of a worker could be replaced by a fixed-cost kiosk and maintenance fees (presumably smaller variable cost than the wages of the employee), why haven’t they?  To assess whether or not the work is really considered “deskilling” I asked myself the following question: Is there any particular benefit to having a human preform the job, over a machine? In my answer I found three areas that partially address the counter-argument: human comfort, bottom-up innovation, and ambience.

            The first argument to the contrary is the desire for comfort. If the dining options of Reynolds Campus Center at Babson College have taught me anything, it’s that the ideal temperature for cooking a hamburger is 155 degrees Fahrenheit. With this knowledge in mind, and with the progression of assembly line technology as we know it, a fully-automated, made-to-order, fast food restaurant is very possible; but the question still remains, do I really want to eat food that was made by a machine? Granted the probability of machine malfunction or failure is roughly the same as the chances of receiving food poisoning from an undercooked burger, there still seems to be a stigma against any sort of artificiality in the food & restaurant industry.  Whether or not it makes any sense, there is still a comfort factor when it comes to ordering food from, or observing the food preparations made by a human, even if their tasks have become automated and scripted to the point of near-robot behavior.

            The second benefit that I recognized from the power of a human-fueled workforce, and quite frankly the one I view as the most important in a McDonald’s-like business, is the potential for bottom-up innovation, as it reduces the availability of human mind-capital. If we’ve learned anything from the Apple business model, it’s that in a competitive environment, one can employ a “run” strategy for success if innovation is constant. As much as machines can perform a task efficiently, they ultimately lack in the “feedback” department. If an employee notices something that can be done to improve the system, or comes up with a new recipe/product idea, he might go out of his way to inform a superior. Although a machine can take all the available resources and ingredients in a restaurant and deliver all the possible permutations, combinations, and related products, only a human employee would be able to create a product that separates the firm from the competition.

The third key point as to why McDonald’s hasn’t completely taken over the restaurant industry is the importance of ambience in the eating experience. The reason why McDonalds has succeeding as much as it has is due to its ability to attract a segment of the market that cared more about receiving their warm food in a timely & convenient fashion than they did about the eating experience.  Although McDonald’s has dominated the food service industry since Ray Kroc established the franchise in the 1950’s, there is still a significant segment of the market that would rather have their dining experience be defined by exquisite dishes (in terms of both food and plating), and general restaurant lighting & setting. Granted, it has still attempted to improve the quality of their recipes; a recent McDonalds campaign in Germany has introduced bi-monthly “chef creations” inspired by famous chefs, but still produced in a streamlined fashion. Even though McDonald’s has made efforts to improve the integrity of its food options, fast food still isn’t appropriate for every dining situation. To put it simply, the average suitor or businessman would not take a potential date/client out for dinner at McDonald’s.

                Although traditional restaurants and McDonald’s appeal to two different demands in the restaurant business, there could possibly be some overlap that has not yet been exploited. What if a sit-down restaurant could eliminate the use of a wait-staff by creating a direct-link between the kitchen and the individual table (tube + pager system from drive-through banking comes to mind), thus maintaining the length, experience, and food quality of a traditional restaurant, while only mildly compromising the “feel” of it. The idea is relatively far-fetched, but it the key point when combining the two segments is to streamline a process without putting integrity completely into question.

            Take any of the structural/operational aspects of a McDonaldized firm (efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control) and combine them with the qualities of a traditional firm. Maybe you’ll discover an untapped market.

Discussion Points:

- Is there operational value in keeping a human workforce in the deskilled labor sector, or are we progressing toward a world of fully machine automated processes?

-Putting the employment issue aside, is there any rationality behind the fear of having an entirely machine automated fast-food restaurant?

-Can some principles of the McDonalds model be applied to a traditional restaurant experience, without compromising the integrity of the restaurant?

- Would the giant succeed if it attempted to tackle the traditional restaurant segment in the same way it has addressed coffee shops with its McCafe’ outing?