This chapter may be difficult to get, but explores how workarounds come to be and spread via two separate observational studies.
Workarounds are defined as “informal, idiosyncratic approaches to circumnavigate a process block” (p8). Prior research highlighted that across 36 hospitals, nurses spent 12% of their work time working around operational failures and constraints.
Workarounds are argued to have social roots, developing because teams, units and organisational members tacitly agree on how to respond to workflows; such that, “workarounds are socially constructed, proliferating, and repeating until they become institutionalized in organizations” (p9).
Authors studied workarounds in medicine and effects of workaround ‘contagion’ among groups. The spread of workarounds may come about in part due to subconscious mimicking of behaviour due to intra-team mutual empathy and reluctance to rock the boat.
Results suggest that workarounds are proliferated mostly through informal training, as teams tacitly problem solve their way around work barriers. Suggesting that workarounds may be more thoughtful and deliberate actions by teams to solve problems, rather than spurious, subconscious and independent.
It may also be a mechanism for people to avoid taking social/political risks due to reporting problems higher up.
New routines overtime become repeating and institutionalised. The results from their first study indicated workarounds to be a collective phenomenon, which are shared between individuals in groups, departments and companies.
Workers believe they are doing what’s necessary and morally right. [This aligns with Sanne’s research on railway workers, believing they need to circumvent rules to get the job done and make-up for ineffective systems. It’s about exercising their expertise, not being deviant].
In studying the contagion of workarounds, the second study found that since coworkers are the overwhelming source of troubleshooting for nurses (92% of workplace troubleshooting is via coworkers) and ~86% of all training is on-the-job, the authors highlight that these factors proliferate the spread of workarounds across the company.
Moreover, since informal on-the-job-training and instruction are often unstructured, this type of activity may be well-suited for promoting the idiosyncratic transfer of knowledge relating to workarounds (e.g. such as when onboarding a new-starter) and particularly the ways in which workers work around the daily work constraints.
Finally, results suggest that we should collaborate and understand why people believe workarounds are necessary—over simply reprimanding them.
In discussing these results, the authors note that from an individual’s perspective, procedures and practices implemented by the company may be perceived as enabling or disruptive. If enabling, it will help the individual or team to accomplish their goals, but if disruptive, it hinders them and creates workflow blocks. Thus, when organisations “create conditions under which disruptive formalization is likely to emerge, workarounds are likely to proliferate throughout the organization (p20).
It’s concluded that workarounds represent a double-edged sword where in one sense they represent creative mechanisms for teams to improve work efficiency and achieve goals, but on the other hand can undermine designated processes which may have severe consequences.
Authors note that evaluating workarounds from an individual perspective is too myopic a view since workarounds based on this evidence appear to be more a social process.
Therefore, “in order to eradicate or optimize workarounds (depending on the organization’s goals or strategy), attention must be paid to understanding the difference in social influence sources, in addition to the dynamics of the workgroups and teams which allow for the emergence of workarounds at the meso-level of analysis” (p25).
Authors: Benjamin B. Dunford, Matthew B. Perrigino, In Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations, 2017: Shifts in Workplace Voice, Justice, Negotiation and Conflict Resolution in Contemporary Workplaces.
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0742-618620180000024003
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/social-construction-workarounds-ben-hutchinson/?published=t
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