Thanks to not feeling alone in the world (thanks u/oorza). I mentioned this story at work today. Is autonomy a necessary part of work happiness? I don’t think so.
Being part of a staff that manages successful delivery (in this case of food items) where at peak moments you deliver in concerto 10x average throughout, time after time was just good for morale. Plus the general goofing of teens. I don’t remember the things that I currently associate with cogs in the machine (say, scripted unpaid toilet breaks for call centers, or a lack of ownership). You owned your tiny part of the customer experience and was near all other parts.
The cogs in the machine part is imho unsuccessfully scripted work. You can’t live up to your own expectations of proper customer service because you are forced in a mold that doesn’t fit, but can’t fix the mold.
Then comes the part that I’m still thinking about. What’s easier to achieve? Great processes and happiness via lean / kaizen that treat autonomy as foundational or great scripted processes that deliver satisfaction without autonomy.
Complexity and autonomy are probably related. Higher complexity makes scripted processes that fit all exceptions a lot harder. On the other hand my experience is that so-called experts frown upon standardization and quality suffers. I’ve done standardization for professionals and have hoped to find a sweet spot between autonomy and scripted work (The Checklist Manifesto comes to mind). But I must admit those sweet spots are harder to find the less I’m intimately aware of what people do from minute to minute.
I would say that there is an upside to restaurant work in that, they're very small operations on a site level, and everyone's jobs usually feed into each other. So if you have a good leader and the team gets along, you're basically spending the day with people you know well and get to enjoy a pretty loose dynamic.
My favorite days were when I had my preferred set of team members and and the day barely felt like work at all for us. Working in a bigger org now, days like that aren't nearly as common.
Would you care to write some more about this?
I was under impression that scripted work is generally considered bad and makes people feel like cogs in a machine.