Wes Bucey said:
The very same mentality that Deming warned about when proscribing buying goods on price alone is likely to carry over in employment decisions.
cncmarine said:
Wes can you please elaborate on the above.
In the majority of the companies that I have been involved with performance reviews = increase.(raise) The paper just gets in the way.
We can all sit through HR workshops and be educated about all the other benefits that motivate employees other then money. The health benefits go up every year, vacation days get trimmed and the biggest BS item in this world is profit sharing. In the small to medium manufacturing environment year to year profit sharing hardly ever happens. Also do not forget all the companies out there bailing out on there pension plans…
But the bottom line is….”Show me the Money” and I will stay.
Deming's 4th point:
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
In my experience, managers and owners who treat EVERY purchase like a reverse auction
(going for the lowest price, then demanding the same quality and service as the highest price supplier) are the same ones who make it a firing offense for employees to share salary or benefit details and always try to pay below-market wages and will take advantage of shy employees too timid to ask for a raise by NEVER giving them one.
These are the same folks who practice a type of age discrimination by forcing out high wage senior employees in favor of low wage young employees.
A company with this kind of manager is characterized by low morale and high turnover of employees.
Sometimes (not always), these are the kind of managers who will hire illegal aliens or aliens who need employment to stay in America, then pay them wages far below market, always holding the threat over them to turn them in to the Immigration Service or to terminate them and notify the Immigration service immediately so the clock begins to run on expiring a work visa.
Tough wage times like the current one where white collar workers have been hit hard by layoffs and outsourcing of jobs to low wage countries are tailor-made to bring out the vicious streak in those managers who were previously held in check when employees could readily find other employment.
Sometimes we hear about "golden handcuffs" - in this case, the handcuffs are rusty iron ones.
My Sunday paper had a profile about a guy who got laid off from a $100,000/year job in a corporate buyout. After one year of unemployment, he took a job with Starbucks at $7.50/hour just to get medical benefits. The vicious practice of exploiting desperate employees seems to only get worse with each passing month.
Paternalism, in my opinion, is just as bad as the vicious exploitation. There is an organization in the Chicago suburbs which makes very well-respected products sold world-wide as components in OEM assembled goods. The work atmosphere, though, is stifling to many because the sole owner of this 500 employee company intrudes himself into the personal lives of his employees, playing the good father figure and personal counselor on decisions ranging from marriage to how many children to have, what clothes to buy, who to vote for, what charities to support. The wage range is from average to below average for similar work in the area. There is a core group of about 100 employees who absolutely LOVE this treatment. One of the women employees is 50 years old, worked for this employer since graduating from high school and has NEVER been outside the corporate boundaries of the small town of 25,000 in her entire life (even during school), not even to go to a museum or theater or store in another suburb, let alone make the 30 mile trip to Chicago's museums, stores, etc. There are folks who crave being cocooned. This woman is not retarded. She is smart and alert in every way except this desire to stay cocooned.
It's a sad variety of sado-masochism for an outside observer to witness. The boss loves to control and some of the employees love to be controlled. Alas, the other 400 employees are trapped by circumstance and desperation into working there.
The owner is older than my own folks. One son couldn't take it and fled the business. The other is a milquetoast, nominally with a big title, but a small salary compared to a comparable title at a similar size organization, waiting patiently to inherit, while the father splurges millions to influence local, regional, and state elections to advance his political agenda.
One good thing about the company - they are absolutely passionate about product and service quality. To my knowledge, no customer has ever been dissatisfied to the point of "firing" them over a quality issue.