Discipline and production

My brother is a cook at the Willows Inn, a no-bullshit up-and-coming restaurant on Lummi Island, WA. This is fun for me, because it allows me to vicariously experience the world of high-end cuisine. I’ll relate a brief story he told me. 

To provide background, I’ll tell you it is frowned upon in these serious kitchens to make noise while working (I only just learned this). Absentmindedly letting a cupboard door slam shut or clanking a couple of pans together while hanging them is a no-no. My brother works with a guy who spent some time in the kitchen at Alinea, an absurdly inventive restaurant in Chicago. A little while ago, my brother let a cupboard door slam or something, and the former Alinea cook said, “Man, at Alinea you would have gotten fired for that.” 

“Fired?” my brother asked him skeptically.

“Yeah, man, you would have gotten fired,” he replied.  

When my brother told me this, I laughed in disbelief. How could they possibly be so strict? But as he and I talked about it a bit more, we decided it made sense in a way. It’s a discipline. Alinea is trying to be the best kitchen in the country, and in the best kitchen in the country, the cooks don’t make noise. The chefs instituting these rules don’t believe that quiet cupboards make the food taste better, but they do believe that the food they want to produce can only be made by highly focused, disciplined cooks. And they’re probably right.

All workplaces have some sort of discipline in place. In any organization of more than, say, 10 people, it’s pretty much impossible for the guy in charge to know each worker as an individual. And if he doesn’t know these individuals—their individual strengths and weaknesses, their capacity for independent work, their motivations—he has to find some best way to control them. It’s not malicious, only pragmatic. 

The most common way of keeping workers disciplined is also the simplest—time. Very rare is the organization that allows its employees genuine flexibility with time. In a restaurant this is natural. Service begins at a specific hour and ends at a specific hour. It’s natural also in a lot of manufacturing plants, where the shop is in operation for 16 or even 24 hours a day on different shifts. 

But in so many other fields—office work especially—the structured time is totally arbitrary. Almost never do I need to be in the building at any particular time. Most of my work is accomplished individually, and I could do it just as easily at 1:00 in the afternoon as at 1:00 in the morning. I could work 5 hours one week and 60 the next. Yet I’m required to adhere to an 8-hour daytime schedule. I’m allowed the flexibility to come it at 7:00 one day and 9:00 the next or to work 7 hours one day and 9 the next, but if I were to suggest that I pull a 24-hour, nonstop, coffee-fueled work marathon, I’d be laughed out of the room.

Yet from the standpoint of simply getting the work done, it shouldn’t make any difference. Working in events and publications means I have a lot of deadlines to adhere to, but it shouldn’t matter if I meet the deadline by working a steady 8 hours per day, Monday through Friday, or if I meet the deadline by putting everything off until the 11th hour and finishing it by working so feverishly that my hands start bleeding. Either way— deadline met, mission accomplished, value added to the organization.

But the average organization can’t allow its workers such idiosyncratic schedules. Doing so would leave discipline in shambles. Completing a certain task might take one worker 20 minutes and everyone else 2 hours. If the faster one were allowed to leave work upon completion of the task, it would raise all sorts of questions. “Did the fast guy really do a quality job?” “If it’s so easy for him, shouldn’t he be doing more work for the company?” “What the hell is wrong with the slow people?”

Questions like this would come up every day. Keeping everyone locked up for the same amount of time preserves the illusion that everyone is equal. It appears that everyone possesses the same ability. And with this difficult-to-penetrate appearance in place, fewer workers will question their positions or the things that get handed to them. Thus everyone stays in line, disciplined.