Work Simplification

Abstract

Work simplification is a form of task performance and analysis that improves a job by getting the people who do it to find and remove its wasted effort. Coined by Allan Mogensen in 1932 as “the organized application of common sense,” it inverted the politics of the Gilbreths’ motion study: where scientific management had an expert prescribe the one best method from above, work simplification trains the worker to chart the task, question every step, and redesign it from below. Its central tool is the flow process chart, which records each step as an operation, transport, inspection, delay, or storage, making waste countable. Its technique is a disciplined questioning attitude that eliminates, combines, rearranges, and simplifies the remaining steps — resting on the claim that the worker holds knowledge the analyst does not, and that participation secures the method’s adoption.

Keywords: work simplification, process chart, ECRS, motion economy, employee participation

Most efficiency methods ask an expert to study a worker. Work simplification asks the worker to study the work. That single reversal — keeping the rigorous analysis of motion study but handing it to the person at the bench rather than to an engineer with a stopwatch — is what distinguishes work simplification from the scientific management it grew out of. Its premise is partly cognitive, that skilled action is built from a small set of reusable steps of which many are waste, and partly motivational, that the operator both knows the job best and will adopt a method they helped design. That dual claim connects it to the psychology of skill learning, attention, and psychomotor performance, and it is why the method survives, renamed, in today’s lean and continuous-improvement movements.

What Work Simplification Is

Work simplification is a structured procedure for making a task easier and faster by removing the parts of it that do no useful work. It begins with a factual record of how the job is done now — every reach, carry, wait, and check — and subjects that record to systematic questioning until a better method emerges. Mogensen defined it in 1932 as “the organized application of common sense” (Mogensen, 1932), and the definition is exact in both halves: organized, because it uses the formal charting and questioning apparatus of motion study, and common sense, because the analysis is meant to be within reach of the ordinary worker, not reserved for a specialist.

The discipline sits at the intersection of industrial engineering and psychology, and its psychological commitments are what separate it from pure time study. First, it treats manual work as compositional — built from a limited set of elemental steps that recur across jobs — so that a task can be charted and its steps counted. Second, it treats most of that activity as waste: the searching, carrying, holding, and waiting that surround the few steps that actually change the product. Third, and distinctively, it treats the operator as the expert on their own job, holding tacit knowledge that an outside observer cannot see, and it treats participation in the redesign as the mechanism that both surfaces that knowledge and secures the worker’s commitment to the new method.

MeSH classifies “Work Simplification” under Task Performance and Analysis, reflecting that the method is, at root, a way of analysing and redesigning how a task is performed. That placement links it to the broader cognitive literature on how limited working memory, divided attention, and the demands of executive function constrain what a person can accomplish within a working day.

Origins: From Motion Study to the Worker’s Hands

Work simplification is the democratic grandchild of the motion study the Gilbreths founded. Frank Gilbreth’s Motion Study (Gilbreth, 1911) and the Applied Motion Study he wrote with Lillian Gilbreth (Gilbreth & Gilbreth, 1917) had shown that a manual task decomposes into elemental motions, that many of them are wasteful, and that redesigning the workplace could eliminate the waste. Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor, 1911) had supplied the opposite instinct: that an expert, not the worker, should determine the one best method and impose it. The two traditions competed openly (Nadworny, 1957), but both left the worker a passive object of study.

Allan Mogensen changed the subject. An industrial engineer who had studied Gilbreth’s methods at Cornell, he reasoned that the person doing a job sees inefficiencies an outsider never will, and that a method a worker helps design is a method a worker will actually use. In his 1932 book he set out work simplification as a portable discipline (Mogensen, 1932), and from the mid-1930s he taught it directly to foremen and operators at his Work Simplification Conferences in Lake Placid, New York, popularising the flow process chart as the tool anyone could learn. Lillian Gilbreth had already made the case in principle, arguing in The Psychology of Management (Gilbreth, 1914) that the worker’s mind, fatigue, and satisfaction belonged inside the analysis; Mogensen made it operational. The International Labour Office later codified the charting and questioning apparatus for worldwide use in its standard Introduction to Work Study (Kanawaty, 1992).

Figure 1

The Flow Process Chart

The signature tool of work simplification is the flow process chart, which records a job as a sequence of steps and tags each step with one of five standard symbols — the scheme the American Society of Mechanical Engineers standardised and the one Mogensen taught, codified for generations of practitioners in Barnes’s standard textbook (Barnes, 1980). An operation (◯) changes or assembles the product and usually adds value. An inspection (□) checks it for quality or quantity. A transport (⇒) moves it from place to place. A delay (D) is a wait, a queue, a temporary hold. A storage (▽) is a controlled, deliberate keeping.

The chart’s power is that it makes a tacit inefficiency literal and countable. Once a job is on the chart, the summary almost always reveals that the value-adding steps — the operations and inspections — are a minority, and that the bulk of the elapsed time and distance is consumed by transports, delays, and storages that the product’s buyer would never pay for. The chart turns “this job feels wasteful” into “this job is nine transports and three delays across forty metres,” which is a thing a worker can see, question, and fix. The chart also records distance and time per step, so the gain from relocating a cabinet or resequencing a workstation can be read off directly.

The Questioning Attitude: Eliminate, Combine, Rearrange, Simplify

A chart only describes; improvement comes from interrogating it. Work simplification applies a disciplined questioning attitude to every step: What is done, and why — is the step necessary at all? Where is it done, when, and by whom — and why there, then, and by that person? How is it done, and why that way? The questions are asked in a fixed priority, because the order encodes how much is saved, and this priority is remembered by the mnemonic ECRS.

Eliminate comes first and pays the most: a step removed entirely needs no further study, and the best candidates are the transports, delays, and storages that add no value. Combine is next: two steps merged — inspecting while transporting, say — remove a handoff. Rearrange resequences what remains, so that the work flows without doubling back. Only last comes Simplify: making a step that survives all three questions easier, by a better tool, fixture, or layout — the motion-economy refinements the Gilbreths pioneered. The order matters because effort spent simplifying a step that should have been eliminated is effort wasted, and the discipline’s most common error is to leap straight to simplify and polish the unnecessary.

Participation: Why the Worker Does the Analysis

The feature that most sharply distinguishes work simplification is who performs it. Mogensen’s wager — captured in the slogan “work smarter, not harder” that the movement popularised — was that handing the method to the operator pays twice. The first payment is knowledge: the person who performs a task a thousand times a day notices frictions an observer timing a single cycle will miss, so the operator is a better source of improvement ideas than the visiting engineer. The second payment is adoption: a change a worker designs is a change the worker owns, which dissolves the resistance that greeted Taylorism’s imposed standards. Lillian Gilbreth’s argument that satisfaction and motivation are proper variables of method study (Gilbreth, 1914) is the theoretical root of this stance, and it is why work simplification is as much a motivational programme as an analytic one. The same logic reappears, explicitly, in the modern practice of kaizen, where continuous improvement is driven by small suggestions from the line rather than edicts from above (Kanawaty, 1992).

Modern Applications: Lean and the Clinic

Work simplification never disappeared; it was renamed. Its vocabulary of value-adding versus wasteful steps, its charting of flow, and its insistence on frontline participation are the direct ancestors of lean production and continuous improvement, where the five process-chart categories survive as the distinction between value-adding and non-value-adding activity. The method’s most active contemporary home, though, is healthcare, where the question — where does the working day actually go, and how much of it is waste? — now bears on clinician burnout and patient safety rather than piece-rate wages. A methodological review found that “time and motion study” is used loosely in healthcare and argued for the rigorous observation that the charting tradition demands (Lopetegui et al., 2014). A landmark study timed physicians across four specialties and found nearly two hours of electronic-health-record and desk work for every hour of patient contact (Sinsky et al., 2016) — a modern inventory of non-value-adding steps of exactly the kind the flow process chart was built to expose. Johanna Westbrook’s group built the observational tooling for recording multitasking and interruptions that makes such studies reliable, related work used the EHR’s own audit log as an automatic process chart (Tai-Seale et al., 2017; Overhage & McCallie, 2020), and observational studies of nursing continue to map how clinical staff spend their shifts (Michel et al., 2021).

Worked Example

Suppose a clerk’s filing task is charted and comes to 12 steps: 5 operations, 1 inspection, 4 transports, and 2 delays. The chart records a cycle time of 3.0 minutes and a walking distance of 40 metres, and the task is performed 200 times per day.

Apply the questioning attitude in ECRS order. Eliminate: moving the file cabinet beside the desk removes 2 of the transports and both delays — 4 steps gone. Combine: two of the operations (stamping and logging) are merged into one. The chart is now 8 steps: 4 operations, 1 inspection, 2 transports, 0 delays. With the walking and waiting cut, the cycle time falls to 1.8 minutes and the distance to 12 metres.

Read the gains off the two charts:

step reduction = (12 − 8) / 12 = 33%

time reduction = (3.0 − 1.8) / 3.0 = 40%

distance reduction = (40 − 12) / 40 = 70%

The time saved per cycle is 3.0 − 1.8 = 1.2 minutes, so across the day:

daily time saved = 1.2 × 200 = 240 minutes = 4.0 hours

The lesson is in the order of the savings. The biggest single gain — the 70% cut in walking — came from eliminating transports and delays, not from making any surviving step faster; nobody worked harder, and the one operator-level change (combining the stamp and the log) was the smallest contributor. That is the method’s central claim in miniature: most of the recoverable time is in the steps that should not exist at all, which is why eliminate is asked first and simplify last.

The demo below makes the leverage explicit: a small cut to a frequently repeated cycle compounds into hours of recovered capacity across a day, which is why work simplification targets high-frequency tasks first.

Discussion

The enduring strength of work simplification is that it reconciles two things scientific management had set against each other: analytic rigour and worker dignity. Taylor’s stopwatch produced precise standards but treated the worker as a variable to be optimised; Mogensen kept the precision of the chart while making the worker the analyst, which is both a better epistemics — the operator knows more — and a better politics — the operator consents. Its limitations are the mirror of its strengths. The “one best method” the chart converges on is powerful for a fixed, repetitive task but brittle for cognitive or highly variable work, where the right method depends on the situation and no chart captures the judgement involved. And participation, the method’s engine, can curdle into its opposite when management uses “simplification” as a euphemism for cutting headcount, at which point the workers who once supplied the ideas stop.

The five process-chart categories differ in whether a customer would pay for them, which is the whole point of charting.

In practice the chart and the questioning attitude are inseparable: the chart without the questions is a description that changes nothing, and the questions without the chart are an opinion with no evidence. The fused method is why a work-simplification exercise first records the job honestly, then eliminates before it simplifies.

Current Directions

The method’s contemporary frontier is automatic and clinical. The electronic-health-record audit log has turned the flow process chart from a scarce, observer-drawn snapshot into a continuous, automatic record of digital work, letting researchers chart the steps of entire health systems rather than a sampled few (Overhage & McCallie, 2020). The open problem is the same one the method has always faced, now sharper: a click log records what was done and when but not why, so it can count the non-value-adding steps without knowing which of them a clinician would defend as necessary judgement rather than waste — which is why observational tools for coding interruptions and multitasking are still run alongside the logs (Michel et al., 2021). The deeper live question is whether the participatory core of the method survives automation: work simplification worked because the worker did the analysis, and a system that charts the work automatically risks reproducing exactly the expert-from-above stance that Mogensen built the method to escape.

Key Researchers

Frank Bunker Gilbreth

(1868–1924). Founded motion study, using photography and the cyclegraph to decompose manual work into elemental motions and, with Lillian Gilbreth, to define the therbligs — the analytic apparatus work simplification later handed to the worker. Wikipedia

Lillian Moller Gilbreth

(1878–1972). One of the first female engineers to hold a PhD and a founder of industrial-organisational psychology; her Psychology of Management (1914) insisted that the worker’s mind, fatigue, and satisfaction belong inside method study — the theoretical root of work simplification’s participatory stance. Wikipedia

Allan H. Mogensen

(1901–1989). Industrial engineer who founded work simplification in his 1932 book, defined it as “the organized application of common sense,” popularised the flow process chart, and taught the method directly to operators at his Lake Placid Work Simplification Conferences from the 1930s. Wikipedia · Wikidata

Christine Sinsky

(contemporary). Vice President for Professional Satisfaction at the American Medical Association, who led the 2016 four-specialty time-and-motion study quantifying how much of the ambulatory physician’s day is spent on the electronic health record and desk work. ORCID

Frederick Winslow Taylor

(1856–1915). Mechanical engineer who founded time study and scientific management; his expert-driven “one best way” is the tradition against which work simplification defined its participatory method. Wikipedia

Johanna Westbrook

(contemporary). Director of the Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research at Macquarie University, who developed modern observational methodology — including tools for recording multitasking and interruptions — that carries the process-charting tradition into contemporary health-services research. ORCID · Faculty · Google Scholar

Glossary

Combine.

The second ECRS step: merging two or more steps that survive elimination into one, removing a handoff or a setup.

Continuous improvement.

The ongoing, incremental redesign of work driven by frontline suggestions; the modern descendant of work simplification, known in Japanese practice as kaizen.

Delay.

A flow-process-chart category (symbol D) for a wait, queue, or temporary hold; a non-value-adding step and a first target for elimination.

ECRS.

The questioning sequence — eliminate, combine, rearrange, simplify — applied in that priority order to each step of a charted job.

Eliminate.

The first and most valuable ECRS step: removing a step entirely because it adds no value, so that no further study of it is needed.

Flow process chart.

The core tool of work simplification: a record of a job as a sequence of steps, each classified as an operation, transport, inspection, delay, or storage, with distance and time.

Inspection.

A flow-process-chart category (symbol □) for checking the product for quality or quantity; value-adding only when the check is genuinely required.

Kaizen.

The practice of continuous, small-scale improvement driven by the people who do the work; the participatory core of work simplification in lean production.

Lean production.

A manufacturing philosophy centred on eliminating non-value-adding activity; its value/waste distinction descends directly from the process chart’s categories.

Motion economy.

The Gilbreth principles for arranging the workplace and the body’s motions to minimise effort and fatigue; the refinements applied in the simplify step.

Operation.

A flow-process-chart category (symbol ◯) for a step that changes or assembles the product; usually the only reliably value-adding category.

Questioning attitude.

The disciplined interrogation of every charted step — what, why, where, when, who, how — from which the ECRS improvements follow.

Rearrange.

The third ECRS step: changing the sequence of the steps that remain so that work flows without backtracking or re-handling.

Scientific management.

Taylor’s expert-driven philosophy of time study and imposed standards; the tradition work simplification kept the rigour of while rejecting its politics.

Simplify.

The fourth and last ECRS step: making a surviving step easier through a better tool, fixture, or layout; asked only after eliminate, combine, and rearrange.

Storage.

A flow-process-chart category (symbol ▽) for a controlled, deliberate keeping of the product; distinguished from a delay by being planned.

Transport.

A flow-process-chart category (symbol ⇒) for moving the product from one place to another; non-value-adding and a frequent target for elimination or rearrangement.

Work simplification.

Mogensen’s method of improving a job by having the worker chart it, question every step, and remove the waste — “the organized application of common sense.”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is work simplification?

Work simplification is a method for improving a job by having the people who do it chart each step, question whether it is necessary, and remove the wasted effort. Allan Mogensen coined the term in 1932 and defined it as “the organized application of common sense.” Its distinguishing feature is that the worker, not an outside engineer, performs the analysis.

How is work simplification different from time and motion study?

They share the same analytic tools, but they differ in who uses them and why. Time and motion study is usually done by an engineer to set a standard time and impose a method. Work simplification hands the same charting and questioning to the worker, aiming to improve the method and to secure the worker’s commitment to it through participation.

What is a flow process chart?

A flow process chart records a job as a sequence of steps and tags each one as an operation, inspection, transport, delay, or storage, along with its distance and time. By classifying every step, it makes visible how much of a job is value-adding work and how much is movement, waiting, and storage that can be removed.

What does ECRS stand for?

ECRS stands for eliminate, combine, rearrange, and simplify — the four actions applied to the steps of a charted job, in that priority order. Eliminating a step saves the most and is asked first; simplifying a step that survives is asked last.

Why does the worker do the analysis instead of an expert?

Because the worker knows the job best and will adopt a method they helped design. Mogensen argued that the operator notices inefficiencies an observer times a single cycle will miss, and that participation dissolves the resistance that greeted the imposed standards of scientific management.

What is the relationship between work simplification and lean or kaizen?

Work simplification is their direct ancestor. Lean production’s distinction between value-adding and non-value-adding activity is the process chart’s categories under new names, and kaizen’s reliance on frontline improvement suggestions is Mogensen’s participatory principle restated.

Is work simplification still used today?

Yes, under several names. Its vocabulary and tools live on in lean and continuous improvement, and its charting of work is widely used in healthcare to study how clinicians spend their time, increasingly by analysing the electronic health record’s own logs.

What are the criticisms of work simplification?

Its “one best method” can be brittle for cognitive or variable work where the right approach depends on the situation. And its participatory engine can backfire when management uses “simplification” to justify cutting jobs, at which point the workers who supplied the improvement ideas stop offering them.

References

Barnes, R. M. (1980). Motion and time study: Design and measurement of work (7th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.

Gilbreth, F. B. (1911). Motion study: A method for increasing the efficiency of the workman. D. Van Nostrand.

Gilbreth, F. B., & Gilbreth, L. M. (1917). Applied motion study: A collection of papers on the efficient method to industrial preparedness. Sturgis & Walton.

Gilbreth, L. M. (1914). The psychology of management: The function of the mind in determining, teaching, and installing methods of least waste. Sturgis & Walton.

Kanawaty, G. (Ed.). (1992). Introduction to work study (4th rev. ed.). International Labour Office.

Lopetegui, M., Yen, P.-Y., Lai, A., Jeffries, J., Embi, P., & Payne, P. (2014). Time motion studies in healthcare: What are we talking about? Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 49, 292–299. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2014.02.017

Michel, O., Garcia Manjon, A.-J., Pasquier, J., & Ortoleva Bucher, C. (2021). How do nurses spend their time? A time and motion analysis of nursing activities in an internal medicine unit. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 77(11), 4459–4470. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.14935

Mogensen, A. H. (1932). Common sense applied to motion and time study. McGraw-Hill.

Nadworny, M. J. (1957). Frederick Taylor and Frank Gilbreth: Competition in scientific management. Business History Review, 31(1), 23–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/3111727

Overhage, J. M., & McCallie, D., Jr. (2020). Physician time spent using the electronic health record during outpatient encounters: A descriptive study. Annals of Internal Medicine, 172(3), 169–174. https://doi.org/10.7326/M18-3684

Sinsky, C., Colligan, L., Li, L., Prgomet, M., Reynolds, S., Goeders, L., Westbrook, J., Tutty, M., & Blike, G. (2016). Allocation of physician time in ambulatory practice: A time and motion study in 4 specialties. Annals of Internal Medicine, 165(11), 753–760. https://doi.org/10.7326/M16-0961

Tai-Seale, M., Olson, C. W., Li, J., Chan, A. S., Morikawa, C., Durbin, M., Wang, W., & Luft, H. S. (2017). Electronic health record logs indicate that physicians split time evenly between seeing patients and desktop medicine. Health Affairs, 36(4), 655–662. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2016.0811

Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. Harper & Brothers.