The workplace has evolved from being mindless to being mindful.  In years past, Henry Ford lamented that when he hired a man to work on the assembly line, the man’s brain came with him.  He suggested that the line worker should just leave his brain in his locker when he reported for work.  One man, one job.  No thinking!

Several years ago, I was on a tour of an CHAMPION spark plug assembly plant in Ohio.  There was a short assembly line with three workers seated on each side of a narrow continuous belt.  As spark plug parts came down the line – metal base, white porcelain center post, steel electrode, brass connector cap – human hands were assembling the parts.  As parts flowed by, the assemblers were talking and laughing about co-workers, their families, the pay scale, etc.  At the end of the line was a co-worker who placed each new spark plug into a x-ray machine.  That job task was to assess if the spark plug had been assembled correctly – good ones were send on, while "bad” ones were rejected and needed to be disassembled and reassembled.

I asked one of the assemblers what the person with the scope at the end was doing.  He said that job was quality control.  Does it pay better, I asked.  Yeah, he replied, but he has to think.  He had to concentrate on what he was doing.  As a result, the QC position could not partake of the assembly line revelry.  Bottom line: Nobody wanted that job.  That was a mindful job.

The workplace is evolving from being mindless to being mindful.  As mundane mindless work tasks are increasingly being performed by robots, humans on the job must increasingly think about what they’re doing.