LII:Planning for Disruptions in Laboratory Operations

Title: Planning for Disruptions in Laboratory Operations

Author for citation: Joe Liscouski, with editorial modifications by Shawn Douglas

License for content: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Publication date: March 2022

Introduction

A high-level of productivity is something laboratory management wants and those working for them strive to achieve. However, what happens when reality trips us up? We found out when COVID-19 appeared.

This work examines how laboratory operations can be organized to meet that disruption, as well as others we may have to face. Many of these changes, including the introduction of new technologies and changing attitudes about work, were in the making already but at a much slower pace.

A brief look at "working"

Over the years, productivity has had many measures, from 40 to 60 hour work weeks and piece-work to pounds of material processed to samples run, all of which comes from a manufacturing mind set. People went to work in an office, lab, or production site, did their work, put in their time, and went home. That was in the timeframe leading up to the 1950s and '60s. Today, in 2022, things have changed.

People went to a work site because that’s where the work, and the tools they needed to do it, were, along with the people they needed to interact with. Secure electronic communications changed all that. As long as carrying out your work depended on specialized, fixed-in-place equipment, you went to the work site. Once it became portable, doing the work depended on where you were and the ability to connect with those you worked with.

The activity of working was a normal, routine thing. Changes in the way operations were carried out were a function of the adoption of new technologies and practices, i.e., normal organizational evolution. However, just as in the development of living systems, the organizational evolutionary process will eventually face a new challenge that throws work operations into disorder. It's a given that disruptions in lab operations are going to occur, and you need to be prepared to meet them.

To that point, the emergence of COVID-19 in our society has accelerated shifts in organizational behavior that might otherwise have taken a decade to develop. That order of magnitude of increase in the rate of change exposed both opportunities people were able to take advantage of and understandable gaps that a slower pace may have planned for. We need to look at what we have learned in responding to the constraints imposed by the pandemic, how we can prepare for the continuation of its impact, and how we can take advantage of technologies to adapt to new ways of conducting scientific work.

This work is not just a historical curiosity but an examination of what we will have to do to meet the challenges of emerging transmissible diseases and geographical population fragmentation caused by, for example, climate change (e.g., disruptions due to storms, power outages, difficulties traveling, etc.) and people’s mobility. All that doesn’t begin to take into account difficulties in retaining personnel and hiring new people.

Much of the “mobility” issue (i.e., “we can work from anywhere”) comes from the idea of “knowledge workers” in office environments and doesn’t apply to manufacturing and lab bench work. Yes, lab work is also knowledge-based, but it’s execution may not be portable, depending on the equipment used and regulatory restrictions (corporate or otherwise) that might be in place.

Why does this matter?

A number of articles have detailed how the COVID-driven shift to remote and hybrid working environments has changed people's attitudes about work, focusing on office activities: what they do and how they do it. Some of it is a change in balance between work and personal lives, some a recognition that “the way things have always been done” isn’t the way things have to be. Where possible some people would like choices in working conditions. That isn’t universal.

Writing for Fortune, journalist Geoff Colvin notes that people who are driven to be fast-track successful prefer to return to a traditional office work environment where closer contact between management and employees can occur; their efforts are more visible. Granted those surveyed for Colvin's article are in financial companies, and are perhaps more driven by shorter term advancement. In addition, a second article written by Erica Pandey for Axios shows that the laboratory real estate market is “hot” and growing. More importantly it is growing where lab-wise intelligence is concentrating, places where similar working environments exist, as well as educational opportunities. That means a growing job market with opportunities for growth and change, but potentially in a confined set of geographies that are vulnerable to problems noted earlier. How do we relieve that potential stress? What happens when severe weather, power disruptions, and contagious disease outbreaks push against concentrations of people working in tight quarters? Is the lab environment flexible enough to adapt to changes in how work gets done?