@Rousseau wrote:
I understand the supply and demand argument - that some bottom feeders will take the shops. The MSC must not care that its reputation is tarnished by accepting feeless work as valuable to it and to its client. But then again, the MSC is known for quantitative reporting with little or no qualitative component. The result, of course, is data that is worthless to any person who cares to know about what is happening on the floor, but valued by MBA types that do not value the business beyond numbers.
Are you sure the quantitative data is not valuable?
"Big data" and it's use in analytics has sort of become the new, indispensable tool for companies trying to track workplace performance and conditions and find areas of weakness they can improve on, find things a company does well, and even illuminate connections not previously even thought about (as sophisticated A.I. in analytics can crunch numbers and make connections at a much faster pace and larger scale than the human mind can process).
I think the big limitations for us humans is that we cannot see everything happening and remember it all at once and also come up with all the connections there are between things (at least, not at a fast pace).
A manager at Texas Roadhouse, who works five days a week, but can only be in one place physically at a time (say the dining room vs. the hostess stand area vs. the kitchen) and whose mind is only focused on so many things at once, will only observe so much. And that manager might see x, y, or z, but not make connections between it and a, b, and c happening the same night. Repeat that over one month and there is even more stuff our minds cannot process and remember.
I think there is value to both human observation with it's intuitiveness and ability to creatively imagine things a certain way (possibly that analytics cannot) and instantly/creatively solve things in a business with a human touch behind it AND the power of analytics for a company. When we gather all sorts of data points for a business on our shops (server greeting speed, upselling frequency - particularly of a specific server, food delivery speed, etc.) that can be number crunched in high volume and large scale that our minds cannot do, you can possibly get a better precision of measurements and also discover new connections of variables in a business. You do lose some "humanness" to the analysis, but I tend to think the two complement each other, instead of one being more dominant than the other.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/10/2020 11:20AM by shoptastic.