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Evolve

Leadership

Want to keep staff happy? It’s simple.

My interview for the position of Head of Manufacturing took place after hours so I could walk the production area without raising awkward questions from the staff. This was a business that had plenty of potential because the marketing gurus had said that the product would sell, but the current lead times of 12/13 weeks had to be reduced by at least 50% to make them a serious option in their marketplace.

The factory floor was a tip—there was half-finished product everywhere and it looked abandoned. If they chose me for the task, I would have six months to turn it round otherwise it would be shut down; I jumped at the chance because I could see from those few minutes observing the carnage I could see what the problem was—the production management had given up.

Monday morning arrived, and I was in bright and early as the staff trickled into the factory for my first day. During the previous six months a senior manager from logistics and a consultant were working together to improve the manufacturing performance. Every Monday morning at 10 a.m. they perused pie charts and bar charts which showed how poorly the previous weeks performance had been.

The senior managers approach was to tell everyone that if they didn’t get better quickly, they would all be out of work, which wasn’t very motivational. Over the next couple of weeks I realised the production team had given up as they did not understand how to make things better, and by the third Monday I was fuming at management’s approach to the problem.

Three young women sitting at a table, working and laughing.
A happy staff is a productive one.
Photo by CoWomen on Unsplash

We all entered the meeting as normal, ready for the weekly humiliation, but on this occasion it didn’t quite go to plan. I asked the senior manager and consultant how long these meetings had been taking place and they told me about six months. I asked them how much change they had seen and they said very little and it had to improve.

I told them politely that I didn’t want to see another bar chart or pie chart again until I said so, as they were obviously not helping the situation. I then asked the production team if for three weeks they would just do as I asked, regardless of what they thought, as we needed to act quickly and I didn’t have time to explain everything. They enthusiastically agreed.

At this stage I should mention that I am a big believer in using stats to run a business, in fact I believe that it’s crucial, but in these circumstances they were seen as management’s stick to beat them with so were part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The first thing that we did was to tidy the place up and do a 5S exercise, which had a positive impact on morale and soon productivity crept up. Over the next six weeks we made lots of changes and reduced lead times by the golden figure of 50%. As they shipped orders out of the door, the customer care team were so relieved because the number of calls chasing orders dropped dramatically and they began enjoying their job again.

In the meantime I gradually brought in relevant measures and stats to show them all how well they were doing and two weeks later they hit the KPI that gave them a £100 bonus each—the first time that they had ever achieved that.

It’s so wonderful when people realise what a difference that they can make after being downtrodden by incompetent managers for so long. It was a case of doing the simple things well before you try to calculate the square root of a pickled onion!

Close up of an onion on a table.
Photo by C Drying on Unsplash

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