There is a hiring philosophy that has become close to unquestioned in fast-growing businesses. Simplify the role until almost anyone can do it. Reduce the training period to a few days. Build a checklist thorough enough that judgment becomes unnecessary. The result, on paper, looks like a genuine operational win: faster onboarding, lower training cost, less dependency on any single hire, a role that can be filled again quickly if someone leaves. What rarely gets asked is what had to be true about the role for this to work, and what got quietly designed out of it in the process.

The Idea That Started This

The engineer Frederick Taylor, whose 1911 book on what he called scientific management shaped a century of industrial thinking, built his entire method on a specific premise. Break any job down into its smallest repeatable components, study each component for the single most efficient way to perform it, and train workers to execute that exact method, without needing to understand why it worked or exercise judgment about when it might not.¹ Taylor's approach was extraordinarily effective at what it was designed for, standardising manual, physical tasks in early twentieth-century factories, where variation between workers was the main obstacle to efficiency. The premise beneath it, that judgment is a cost to be engineered out of a role rather than a value to be cultivated within it, outlived the factory floor it was designed for. It shows up today in how many mid-sized businesses design front-line and even mid-level roles, not because anyone consciously adopted Taylor's philosophy, but because the underlying logic, simpler role, faster onboarding, lower dependency on any one person, is genuinely attractive under growth pressure.

What Gets Lost in the Simplification

The economist Harry Braverman, writing more than sixty years after Taylor, gave this pattern a name that has stuck in labour research since: deskilling.² Braverman's 1974 study documented how, across many industries, jobs that once required judgment, context, and accumulated experience were systematically redesigned into narrower, simpler tasks that required neither. His argument was not that this always happened out of malice. It happened because simpler, more standardised roles are cheaper to staff, faster to fill, and easier to manage at scale. The cost was harder to see, a steady erosion of the depth and adaptability that used to live inside those roles, replaced by procedures that worked well under normal conditions and badly the moment something unusual happened. This is the trade mid-sized businesses make, often without naming it as a trade at all, when they simplify a customer-facing or operationally significant role purely to speed up onboarding. The role becomes easier to fill. It also becomes less able to handle the exception, the annoyed customer whose situation doesn't fit the script, the operational hiccup the checklist didn't anticipate, the judgment call that separates a good outcome from a merely adequate one.

The Evidence That Complicates the Trade-off

The MIT Sloan School economist Zeynep Ton, in her 2014 study of retail operations, put this trade-off to an empirical test that most businesses assume they already know the answer to.³ Ton compared retailers that had simplified roles and minimised labour investment against a smaller set of retailers, including Costco and the Spanish grocery chain Mercadona, that had done the opposite: invested in broader, better-trained roles, deliberately keeping more judgment inside the front line rather than engineering it out. Her research found that the higher-investment retailers consistently outperformed on both operational metrics and financial returns, not despite the higher cost of a more capable workforce, but because that capability reduced errors, improved customer experience, and lowered the very turnover that speed-optimised roles were originally designed to survive. Ton's finding complicates the assumption that simplifying a role for fast onboarding is a straightforwardly efficient choice. It trades a visible, immediate cost, slower hiring, more training investment, for a set of invisible costs that show up later: inconsistent judgment at the point of customer contact, an operation that performs well only when nothing unexpected happens, and, often, the very turnover the simplification was meant to make painless, because a role stripped of judgment is also a role stripped of the engagement that keeps good people in it.

Not Every Role Needs Depth

None of this means every role should be redesigned for depth. Some functions genuinely benefit from standardisation, high-volume, low-variability tasks where consistency matters more than judgment, and where a well-designed process outperforms individual discretion almost every time. The mistake is not standardisation itself. It is applying the logic of standardisation to roles where the variation, the annoyed customer, the unusual case, the judgment call, is not a rare exception to be scripted around, but the actual substance of the job. Businesses rarely make this distinction deliberately. They apply the same instinct, simplify for speed, uniformly across roles that would benefit from it and roles that would be quietly hollowed out by it, because the instinct is organisational, not role-specific.

A Question Worth Sitting With

It's worth asking, of every role a business has simplified in the name of faster onboarding, what kind of situation that simplification assumed would never come up. Every checklist has an edge it was not written for. The question is whether anyone still working that role has the judgment left to recognise the edge when it arrives, or whether the business quietly designed that recognition out of the job years ago, in exchange for being able to fill it faster.

Falgun has worked with founder-led businesses across telecom, hospitality, and premium consumer brands for 28 years. He writes from experience, not observation.

References

Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper & Brothers, 1911.
Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Monthly Review Press, 1974.
Ton, Zeynep. The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. New Harvest, 2014.