Page 79 - Bloomberg Businessweek July 2018

◼ TECHNOLOGY
Man vs. Machine Lab Technicians

potential panelists in advance, so she could look
up their job titles, biographies, and work back- Modular automation from HighRes
grounds using an internal phone tool and LinkedIn. Biosolutions lets lab technicians quickly
Employees can dismiss some panelists they worry disconnect, move, and reconnect
will be unsympathetic. It didn’t help much, she says:
At the hearing, the videoconference made it difficult mobile carts containing robotic arms
to engage with any of the panelists on a personal and other devices, expanding the range
level, and she sweat through her shirt. She wasn’t of experiments that can be performed
invited to watch her boss’s presentation, and he
got the last word. She waited by the phone until the at a single site.
career ambassador called to tell her she’d lost.
The system could pay for itself by reducing the The Benefit
cost of worker departures. A company with a 10 per-
cent turnover rate—meaning 1 in 10 workers leave
each year (a conservative estimate for a tech com- One HighRes system can do the work of 20 to 30 lab techs
pany)—has to dedicate about 5 percent of its annual with fewer errors, enabling faster development of drugs at
payroll to recruit, hire, and train replacements, says lower cost, says Chief Executive Officer Peter Harris.
Fred Whittlesey, a compensation expert who previ-
ously worked for Amazon. For a company Amazon’s
size, those costs run into the hundreds of millions of Innovator Background
dollars. “There’s a huge financial incentive to reduce Louis Guarracina, 44, co-founder Guarracina, a chemical engineer, founded
HighRes in 2004 after leading lab automation
and chief technology officer
turnover, if you can do it in a sensible way,” he says. of HighRes Biosolutions Inc. in at MIT, Harvard, and drugmakers including
Amazon hired dozens of career ambassadors Beverly, Mass. Novartis International AG.
around the world to explain Pivot to employees.
Yet the appeal process is so tough to navigate that
it’s created a steady stream of work for employment 23
lawyers giving consultations to workers preparing
for their appeals, say attorneys familiar with the pro-
cess. Tamblyn says his client was forced to focus on
performance issues highlighted by her manager
instead of her recent job change within the com-
pany for which she had little time to adjust. “The
fact that she was hired for one job and switched to
another was a very important fact,” says Tamblyn.
“She wasn’t allowed to present her case.” Amazon
declined to address this specific concern.
Seattle employment lawyer Alex Higgins says he’s
consulted with about 10 Amazon employees pre-
sented with performance-improvement plans. Four
of those clients appealed, and one prevailed, he
says. But even that client left for another job shortly Tasks
after because the tension remained with his boss. “It HighRes systems include incubators, freezers, carousels, centrifuges, robotic arms,
scales, fluid handlers, and optical sensors, all linked by PC software that coordinates
doesn’t really provide a long-term solution,” Higgins tests on hundreds of thousands of compounds a day.
says. “The people on the appeal panel say you’re
right, and they go away. Then you’re still with the The Verdict
same boss, who thinks you aren’t doing a good job.”
After Jane’s career ambassador called to tell her
she’d lost the appeal, she had one business day to Will automation replace lab techs? Steven Hamilton, director
decide if she wanted to accept about one month of of education at the Society for Laboratory Automation and
severance pay to leave or attempt to meet the goals Screening, says the already relentless pace of laboratory
of her performance-improvement plan. She chose automation will continue, but he doesn’t see fewer lab jobs on
to keep working. �Spencer Soper the horizon. Instead, to keep pace with automation, “laboratory
technicians need more education and more specialized education
THE BOTTOM LINE The employee-appeal process may help than they did in past decades.” �Michael Belfiore
ALAMY Amazon retain more of its 500,000 workers, but so far, panel
members side with their peers only about 30 percent of the time.