Musings on Crew Labor
This post will be a shadow of what I’d like it to be, but manual labor is exhausting and even though I churn a lot of thoughts over the course of a harvest day, I don’t find them to be as polished as what I’d get if I ‘sat down to write’. Still, I’d rather communicate a fresh but raw thought, than have it slip by the wayside.
Crew Labor
The basic unit of labor (for the kind of harvest I was raised on) is the crew. Four, six, or eight workers are given a shared task.
“move the food from scattered among the plants, to concentrated in a wagon”
“unload the sand from the wagon, to the plants”
These are matter-of-fact jobs. The success condition is visible and obvious. One person cannot do them alone. The tools are provided, and the crew (with formal or informal crew lead1) can develop the best way for the assorted skills, talents, weaknesses, shortcomings of the various members to accomplish the task.
My attention to crew dynamics has refined over the years (from being a not-particularly-helpful preteen, to leading the crew, to working on the crew while explicitly not leading, so that others could develop leadership). When I was young, I didn’t have much room for thoughts other than “don’t trip” and “put food in wagon.” As I got older, food physics and the visual tells of food physics started revealing themselves to me. As a crew lead and as a ringer, more of my thoughts are about the cooperation of the superorganism of the crew. Since I have a blog this year, these strike me as ‘bearing mentioning to those who’ve never worked on a crew, for reflection on crew-analogs in their own lives’:
Watching abilities and duties match up
When one puts an ad in the newspaper for “manual labor, $22/hr” you’re getting a mixmatch of people. Your siblings and some of your cousins show up and, and so do some people that recall of McNamara. But this is good. The more manual the labor and the simpler the tools, the lower the bar for positive contribution to the goal.
And one thing that delights me is to observe the crew (acting as a superorganism) implicitly and explicitly allocate duties to the people who are best suited for them. Some people love tasks where they don’t have to make decisions (“neck-down jobs”). Others like to analyze on the fly and adapt to changing circumstances. Some are team players and slot themselves in where they see gaps. The fact that, year in and year out, with a changing cast of characters, over the course of the first two or three days, a crew congeals into its unique rhythm and compromises that then stay intact for the next two weeks, is something I continue to marvel at.
Setting tasks for rotation to avoid fatigue, or non-rotation for individuals to specialize
The natural assortment into roles takes place regardless of whether a leader has been named, and regardless of whether the leader is weak or strong—but the presence of a named, strong leader can make a big difference in long term crew morale by assigning task rotation.
Manual labor tires a body out, and usually asymmetrically. A good leader knows which role is the most physically exhausting, and uses that role as a barometer to switch roles to keep bodies fresh.
While some roles can be repetitive and fatiguing, other roles can be works of finesse and specialization. Letting a crew member develop expertise can, via leverage, make the work easier for the whole crew. But if a specialized crew member is exempted from ever doing the grunt work, the crew will get envious. So a good leader is watching for opportunities where the sailing is smoothest, where there are natural gutter-bumpers, or where the crew was running ahead of schedule, to plug someone else into the finesse role and to let the specialist take his turn with the short handled shovel.
Responses of actionable displeasure (bad instructions) vs responses of exhaustion
When doing hard work, people complain. But there are lots of flavors of complaining—some are idle chatter and can be ignored; some are letting the lead know “I don’t understand, say it a different way,”; some are “my body can’t do that”. A good lead is attentive to the differences, and responds accordingly.
What’s the most effective instruction?
Some people want to understand the big picture, and then slot their action into it accordingly. Some people want to be told “do action X.” You get better responses from people when you give them the kind of instruction that they crave. Giving big picture people “just do X” results in them feeling impotent and checking out. Giving concrete-action-people the big picture can sometimes be no-loss, but can sometimes get the crew sidetracked in circular discussion.
The Derivative: “Teambuilding”
Having grown up working on labor crews, it’s easy to see why ‘teambuilding’ events (build a toothpick and marshmallow tower with a random team of 3 coworkers! go to an escape room with the accounting department!) are devised for groups that need to work cooperatively but don’t manipulate physical objects on a daily basis. Working against physics toward a common goal helps cement “this are my cooperators, this is my tribe” in a way that few other things I’ve experienced can do.
Unfortunately, the middle school pointlessness of the marshmallow tower is a pretty pale reproduction of the real thing. Fake obstructions, rulesmongering, are not as motivating as physical obstructions. “The HR lady told me to” is not as motivating as “my paycheck depends on the food getting in the wagon.”
Brainstorming Better Teambuilding
If I was in charge of teambuilding for the accounting department, my first crack might be “here are three felled trees, a couple types of manual saws, matches, and package of bratwurst. As a team, cut the trees, build a fire, and roast the brats.” This would allow the “workforce” to sort into specialty, find ways to spell each other to relieve fatigue, touch the real world, and get a reward that’s actually valued at the end.
Adieu
But now I should get my head out of the cyberclouds, and back to the physical realm. Having been lucky enough to hire a fiddle-playing friend to help with this year’s harvest, we’re capping most evenings with old-time tunes.
there are also oh-so-many ways this can go wrong! lots of fodder for future essays, on case studies of crew dissent and failure