Image source: Textually.orgThe day after taking over the plant the HR Manager came in to my office and asked if I would like to meet the shop steward. She minded me that the previous plant manager had a daily meeting with the steward and asked if I would be doing that too. I told her that I was aware of the meetings, but no, I did not intend to continue them, but of course I would like to meet the shop steward. We had a pleasant five minute meeting. He asked me how I intended to process the outstanding grievances. I told him that I knew there were problems between the managers and supervisors and the workers and I would be addressing them immediately. I assured him that any time that I was aware of an instance where management did not uphold the contract to the letter, it would be corrected immediately whether or not a formal grievance was filed. I think it was the last meeting I ever had with the shop steward. It confirmed my long held belief that if people are treated fairly and in a way consistent with good management practices, both union and non-union employees will perform at a high level.
My next order of business was to hold a meeting with the managers and supervisors concerning the appalling safety record of the plant. It was literally an unsafe place to work and was running at the rate of several injuries per month, which was far worse than the next worst plant in the whole corporation. I asked each person in the group to tell me what they thought was causing the problem, and to my amazement, every single person blamed the workers for their injuries. They said the people just didn’t care. It was unbelievable to me that they actually thought that workers would hurt themselves on purpose.
I told them that I believed that there were two places a person should be safe and their families could rest assured that they would be safe in those places. The places are at school and at work. I went on to tell them that I took it personally when someone in my organization got hurt. That I had let them down and I had let their families down. Any plant that was unsafe was a failure of management, not a failure of the workforce. So how do we improve the safety of the plant? It isn’t about a Human Resources program, but simply how seriously the managers and supervisors took safety. I told them that the next time a person in the shop was hurt, I was to be informed immediately. If someone had to be taken to the clinic, the person’s supervisor was to go with them. Any safety incident would be investigated within twenty four hours, with containment and corrective actions initiated immediately. Each manager and supervisor would initiate these things immediately and let the paperwork catch up later. The group looked a little embarrassed, but they got the message.
I then moved to the grievances. When I asked about these, the supervisors basically said the rules in the contract were unworkable and mostly stupid. The biggest gripe was with the seniority rules as applied to overtime. The contract stated that the senior person in each classification was to be offered any overtime available and if they refused, the next senior person should be offered the OT until someone accepted. This is a pretty standard work rule in union contracts. The problem for the supervisors was that they didn’t want to follow it. If a junior person was working on a job, they wanted that person to complete it on overtime since the more senior person wouldn’t know anything about the work and would take twice as long to complete it by the time they came up to speed. Beyond that it was apparent that they just weren’t very familiar with the contract language, or how to interpret it. I convened several mandatory meetings with all the managers and supervisors to go over the contract line by line. They were informed that we would only fight grievances where the worker was in clear violation of the contract, or the interpretation of the contract was in question. This allowed for the situation where the supervisor wanted a junior person to complete a job on overtime. The contract remedy for not offering the work and allowing a junior person to do it was that the most senior person had to be paid for the hours worked (in addition to the person who did the work). That might be an acceptable business decision in some instances, so why fight it – just pay it. The education on the contract and the policy that we would follow it to the letter resulted in an immediate reduction of grievances to near zero. When a potential grievance offense occurred, it typically led to a teaching opportunity for the supervisor involved. I was careful to not undermine the supervisor’s authority by allowing the supervisor to be the face of the company in the response whenever possible so that they would gain credibility and not lose it. The last thing I wanted was the supervisor to be viewed as weak by the work force.
Once the safety and labor relations were addressed, I moved to the organization and operations. What I found was that there seemed to be no obvious relationship between the experience of the supervisors and the jobs they were performing. This happened because whenever a supervisor left, the plant manager would hire the best supervisor he could find into that position. This seems to make sense until you looked at the plant as a whole. The supervisor in charge of the metal fabrication department had a few years of fabrication experience, but over twenty years running a warehouse. The supervisor running the warehouse had never worked in a warehouse before his current position, but had many years of metal fabrication experience as a supervisor. This was an obvious switch, but there were others as well. The good news was that everyone in management was hungry for a change, and no one resisted efforts to make things better. It took a little convincing, but several job changes, as well as task and responsibility reassignments, were embraced.
I also found that there was mothballed equipment in the plant that could be used in departments that were capacity constrained. The logic was that led to these machines being taken out of service was that they were slow, old, and inaccurate machines. With minimal expense, these machines were put back in operation to handle jobs that did not require the precision of the newer machines. We also revamped the production schedule to make it much tighter and productive. With less time spent on grievances, safety issues, and other personnel issues, and with additional machinery in production, output and productivity began to soar.
I thought the turn-around was going better than expected until I realized the late order number was going up. The plant measured late orders by dollar amount late. This was just one of the problems at the plant, but poor delivery predictability and poor quality were the things that impacted customers most directly. The plant had been running at about $250,000 of orders past due for over a year. When you consider the product was lighting fixtures, with an average price of about $50, that’s a lot of late product! Working with the managers and supervisors, I published a written recovery plan, so that everyone would know what was different and what was expected of everyone. After a week of recovery efforts, the past due hit $350,000. After two weeks it was at $500,000. I knew things would get worse before they got better, so I wasn’t panicking yet. After three weeks, we hit $650,000 and I started to panic.
What would you do here? Stay the course? Change everything back? Try something completely new?
Check in for part III in a few days to see how this saga ends.
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