working smarter not harder:
A QUESTION OF BALANCE
in speech pathology practice

Balance
Maintaining efficiency in the speech-language pathology workplace sometimes seems like two big balancing acts. Whatever combination our workload comprises - clinical practice, administration, teaching, or research - all of us, and all our colleagues, strive to maintain a comfortable, if not perfect, equilibrium between work routines, roles, responsibilities, requests and relationships on the one hand, and the pleasures, demands, distractions, interruptions obligations and relationships of our lives outside of work, on the other.

Well known for raising 12 children (Carey and Gilbreth, 1948), and not so famous for coining the terms sait (an avoidable delay), and therblig (Gilbreth backwards), exponents in the art of achieving this balance were the amazing time and motion study expert Frank Gilbreth 1868-1924, and the brilliant engineer and industrial psychologist Lillian Moller Gilbreth 1878-1972.

Incentives
Influenced by F W Taylor (1911), and acknowledged as  the mother of modern management, Lillian Gilbreth was engrossed in the psychological and personal aspects of time management. She believed that workers are motivated by indirect incentives (for example, pay, conditions, productivity contests, and expenses), direct incentives (such as job satisfaction), and perverse incentives (avoidance of unintended consequences). Although the term was not in her vocabulary, Lillian addressed many of the issues surrounding what we now recognise as professional burnout, observing the impact on time management of individual fatigue and workplace stress. 

Wounded
Frank, meanwhile, was concerned with the technical aspects of worker efficiency and productivity. Visiting Germany in the early stages of the first World War to install new machines and establish laboratories, his attention was soon drawn to the plight of wounded soldiers returning to Germany. First working to improve surgical procedures, Gilbreth pioneered the educative use in operating theatres of motion picture photography. Then he turned his efforts to the rehabilitation of the soldiers themselves, developing methods of teaching them to compensate for their injuries (many of them were amputees) in order to better manage their daily activities. He and Lillian co-authored a paper presented at the 10th Sagamore Sociological Conference in 1917, called "Motion Study for the Handicapped". It included a design for a typewriter with all capital letters and no shift key, eliminating the need for two-handed operation.

Therbligs
Central to Frank Gilbreth's work during this period was the study of the seventeen fundamental motions used to perform physical tasks, such as search, find, select, grasp, and position. He created a flow chart that illustrated each fundamental motion. The chart could be used to dissect tasks into their component motions, substitute other motions if possible, and adapt jobs to accommodate the rehabilitation needs of the soldiers. 

Right and proper
Lillian's account of incentives did not include the notion from political economy of moral incentive: a tendency for a person to make choices and behave in certain ways when he or she believes that it is the right, proper and appropriate thing to do. Conscientious, committed, empathic, highly responsible people with exacting work ethics, difficulty saying "no", and susceptibility to the guilt trips that can be closely associated with moral incentives, are well-represented within our profession. 

At the beginning of the retirement process, a life-stage, that can last 30 years or more, it is common for caring professionals to search for the "right" way to do it, or to guiltily postpone the search! In early retirement, especially if it has crept up on them, they experience feelings of loneliness - missing work colleagues and clients; emptiness - missing a sense of challenge and productivity; and uselessness - missing the satisfaction of making a contribution.

Style
Redefining Retirement the cover story by Melissa Dittmann in the November 2004 APA Monitor on Psychology, pushes the point that achieving a balance - not just of the banking variety - is at the core of good retirement planning too. The balancing acts don't just go away, but are there in different forms. As the retiree comes to terms with what they are retiring from, and what they are retiring to, home may feel crowded. Spouses and partners get under each other's feet and on each other's nerves - and relationships, everyday routines, and roles undergo a shake-up, regrouping around a new self-perception and a retirement style.

But as a retired psychology professor turned life transition consultant, Nancy K Schlossberg (2004) found, there are many paths to retirement, and retirees do not necessarily maintain the same style throughout. "It's an evolving part of your career development, and the longer you live, the more your path will shift and change." By analysing interviews with a hundred or so retirees she identified six categories of retirement style.

Continuers...
People who remain in touch with work skills and activities, modifying them to fit retirement. These are the volunteers and part timers who actually remain in their field.

Adventurers... 
Those who branch out, diversify and acquire new skills. These are the retirees who learn a language or a musical instrument, or who take up completely new paid work.

Searchers...
Individuals who learn by trial and error, seeking an identity and somewhere where they fit in, in retirement.

Easy gliders... 
The laid back types who enjoy unscheduled time and like their daily happenings to, well, just sort of happen.

Involved spectators... 
Retirees who maintain an interest in their previous field of work but assume different roles, like artists who collect art.

Retreaters... 
Become depressed, retreat from life and give up on finding a new path. Obviously, peoples, Style Goddess Kath Day-Knight would be ready to have the last word on that.

 

References

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Page updated February 05, 2010

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