In 1914, an engineer sent away to reorganize a factory exchanges letters with his wife. As he tells her about his experiments in taylorism, she picks up bits and pieces of this method and applies it to her daily tasks at home. While he gets disappointed by the Taylor system, she becomes a true domestic engineer. Mingling images of American institutional movies to extracts of handbooks on management from the 1900s and 1910s The Human Factor aims at showing the genesis of Taylorism and its main effects upon industrial societies. It is also a love story.