Editorial

Citation

Heap, J. (2001), "Editorial", Work Study, Vol. 50 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ws.2001.07950eaa.001

Editorial

I'm writing this at the end of a(nother) long day and I'm quite tired. Of course, there's tired – satisfied, and there's tired – frustrated. The first is OK – as long as it doesn't happen too often, the other is much more stressful. There's also tired – physical, and tired – mental. Again, the first is usually easier to cope with, and the recovery period is often shorter. I would claim that I've been working too hard – and I have. I'm without a key member of my senior staff and so I'm doing at least one and a half jobs – again, OK for a relatively short time, but no good over any extended period.

What's this got to do with Work Study, I hear some of you ask. Well, just be patient, I'm coming to it. It's the subject of relaxation allowances. You must remember in the olden days when we all had our own stop watches and measured anything that stood still or moved. When we'd measured the basic time (performing all those simple but tiresome calculations along the way), we added relaxation allowances to provide the operator with the chance to "attend to personal needs and to recover from the physical and mental fatigue associated with the work".

Things moved on (long after I'd hung up my stopwatch and everyone was using these new-fangled electronic study boards). Added to the concept of relaxation (or rest) allowances was the concept of the "work-rest regime". This suggested that true attention to the health and safety of workers required more than a simple addition to the time taken to carry out work – it needed a sensible approach to managing the nature and length of working periods and the associated breaks.

Now, that's what I need – a work-rest regime. And, of course, being a senior figure in the organisation, I should be able to create one for myself. But I either succumb to the pressures of my job – or I succumb to the macho-management style of my organisation, whichever way you decide to look at it. If the former, I have a problem. If the latter, the organisation has a larger problem.

But of course, its not just what I need. I am using my own situation to illustrate a larger problem. How often is formal work measurement (that addressees the concept of rest allowances) carried out? More rarely all the time. There must be many workers in my situation, feeling overworked and under pressure. We all wonder what happened to the life of leisure we were promised 30 years ago when automation took over all our jobs, and we all worked part-time. Perhaps we need someone to undertake a new job – under a health and safety remit – associated with ensuring that staff take proper, structured rest breaks.

Some of you will be thinking that you need all the work you can get from your workforce – times are hard, and competition fierce. But, being a good work study man, I know that a healthy, satisfied and safe workforce is a high productivity workforce. This is a win-win situation. Offer opportunities for appropriate work-rest regimes and your workforce will respond with greater effort.

Anyone want to be the first organisation to employ a rest officer?

John Heap