RosieA said:
Yup, perfect sense. I went through that exact mental process last week when I was in Mexico. I defaulted to the daily feedback and problem solving meeting because the worker training issue and the engineering poke-a-yoke approach were not going to be fast enough.
I can have the daily meetings in place almost immediately. of course, my frustration is that I can't be down there to guide them when they begin having them, because of priorities in the US.
If not done right, they can be ineffectual. I just keep my fingers crossed that I explained what I wanted well enough.
I am still pursuing the HR/training and mistake proofing approaches, however. This isn't a nice simple, one dimensional problem. But they just weren't fast enough for immediate use.
I can have the daily meetings in place almost immediately. of course, my frustration is that I can't be down there to guide them when they begin having them, because of priorities in the US.
If not done right, they can be ineffectual. I just keep my fingers crossed that I explained what I wanted well enough.I am still pursuing the HR/training and mistake proofing approaches, however. This isn't a nice simple, one dimensional problem. But they just weren't fast enough for immediate use.
I was uncomfortable with any post which implied the workers were not capable or that the processes should be aimed at "lowest common denominator" more as a matter of my loyalty to Deming's concepts than to the reality of the situation.
Wallace wrote:
"I certainly see that there may be obvious disadvantages placed on some employees who are employed for labour that doesn't need much intelectual power. I saw throughout your post that the workers were the ones who knew exactly what the problems were, when they were pointed out to them."
bpritts wrote:
"This is likely to have some benefit if it's accompanied by improved training and competence, but it's also possible that keeping the same weak employees longer (possibly at higher wage rates) could just increase expenses and make no difference."
Rosie never implied the workers were "weak" or incapable of performing intellectual work. She wrote:
"Our strategy has been to keep lower skilled/newer employees on less critical jobs, and compensate the higher skill levels to keep them, but this alone, isn't helping improve the defect rates. We have a particular problem with getting corrective actions to stay corrected."
The implication being lower skill was merely a factor of time on the job. Call me Pollyanna if it makes you feel better, but I have an innate belief that most employees have the ability to perform a task if the instructions are in a language they understand. When Greg made picture books out of his instructions, is that any different than writing in Spanish for Spanish-educated workers? The point is that the instructions were understandable to his workers. The workers weren't necessarily unintelligent, just uneducated (two different things in my book.)
Greg correctly separated the reasons for employee turnover from reasons for Quality discrepancies and dealt with the issue of product nonconformance in an effective manner. The issue may not be one so much of "training" as there being a method to continually reinforce the training by means of errorproof guides at the individual work station. These guides could specifically address the kinds of nonconformities which seem to occur most frequently at those stations.
(I love the "help button" on my WORD, EXCEL, and ACCESS programs for referral to a seldom-used feature that I "vaguely" remember how to use. I don't feel less intellectual for using the help feature to save false starts and time consuming trial & error routines.)
Some studies (not all, certainly) conclude employee turnover drops in situations where employees feel they are making a real contribution to the job and not just "putting in time." Eliminating some of the rancor over nonconforming product [by reducing nonconformity] would help employees feel more like their labor was worthwhile.
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Thanks for bringing this thread up from the depths of passed time.