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Sherrie Ford, Ph.D.
Principal, Change Partners, LLC
IndustryWeek Best Plants
We are in a manufacturing era when the next generation of so many things has never been more evident. The next generation of inventory management plant-floor layout, and supplier relations and certification. The next stage of the transition from pushing a batch order through the system to pulling a unique order through late customization. Lean production – mass, but custom. You know the goals – compress time, expand customer delight.
To read the profiles published in any year's edition of INDUSTRYWEEK's America's Best Plants report, each wave of next-generation initiatives brings stupefying results in productivity and profitability. The speedy succession from one next-generation solution to the next makes top management ever more astute at fighting the evils of time and variation. In turn, it makes the outside observer of manufacturing management aware of how complex and blurred the subject of global competition has become.
Just listen to the claims: "We must be the fastest, the most cost-effective, the most service-oriented, the most customer-responsive factory on the planet!" "We must be certified by Ford (or Wal-Mart, Sears, ISO 9000, and so on)!"
And so the decision-making energy is poured into the two holy grails of quality and efficiency – as well it should, if America is to compete. But what about what seems to be an "invisible" system, except when it makes headlines as with recent strikes at UPS, General Motors, and almost (gasp!) at Saturn?
Work culture is the invisible system, easily hidden from view every time, say, a union contract is negotiated and we check off work culture as meaning pay and benefits.
In addition to time and variation, there is, in fact, a third evil: isolation. Unquestionably, we have defaulted in a major way by isolating the shop floor from management, letting chance rather than information be the guide to shaping our manufacturing work cultures.
Has there ever been a next-generation movement for work culture? Yes, to some extent. Going from quality circles – at one time regarded as a radical, next-generation concept – to the self-directed work teams in place in a number of today's factories represents an attempt to bring about change in work culture. And if you include today's redrawn organizational charts, with business-unit managers rather than plant managers, along with formulas for variable team-based pay, an array of vision and mission statements, and wall charts on meeting behaviors in the more progressive training rooms, you find quite a history of next-generation strategies for the people side – amusingly called "the soft side" – of manufacturing management.
However, close examination of these next-generation work-culture strategies reveals that they were add-ons to the next generation of manufacturing systems. Work culture as work culture – not an inventory issue, or software issue, or raw materials issue, or even a human resources issue – remains to this day an invisible, unexamined determinant of success in global competition.
What does it all mean for those on the front line in manufacturing? Those in front-line supervision, along with those on the line – operators, associates, team members, hourly people (union members in some cases) – make up 90% or more of the work culture, the entity that prevails where actual (not virtual) raw material becomes actual (not virtual) product. It is my observation that they have remained essentially invisible, left out of the decision-making matrixes; for the work culture at large, the concepts of next-generation critical philosophies or systems of manufacturing do not exist.
What is my evidence? We all assume the obvious significance of the phrase "customer satisfaction" as today's guiding premise in world-class thought. It's so much richer in meaning than the old concept of the "the customer is always right" – meaning, don't argue with a customer even when we know the customer is a bit dim. Today's customer is the be-all and end-all of every strategic moment in a world-class manager's day.
But customer satisfaction is a supreme oxymoron to the shop floor. I hate to be the bearer of this disappointing news, but it's true. No amount of world-class propaganda about today's no-excuses environment driven by customer has yet to convince people on most shop floors that it is even a meaningful goal. Very little about the virtues of the 21st-century factory espoused by up-and-coming young plant managers (or even by the veterans who have at last seen the light) are recognizable to the hourly employee.
When I pretend, in icebreakers with mixed groups of hourly and maintenance personnel, to be their biggest customer – Wal-Mart, Toyota, the Europeans – an instant chill descends on the room. Rather than breaking the ice, I find that the ice thickens. The customer is nothing but one, big, fat headache that is getting worse and worse.
Let me tell you: The shop-floor world is extremely restless, hostile, stressed, mad, and blaming – of one another and of management – and not the least bit enamored of customers. Trust levels and a sense of security have sunk to new lows, it appears, as the years have gone by. Turnover is abnormally high. Those who remain are frustrated over having to make production at ungodly rates, in seemingly irrational configurations, and at the same time train an endlessly revolving door of new hires.
Don't get me wrong. Peel away a few layers of defensiveness with the shop-floor worker and you find an almost electrifying energy, but it doesn't come out when you talk about customers. It comes out when you talk about competitors.
What has not be talked about, thus leaving work cultures extremely vulnerable to their own worst fears, is the dynamic of change and how it ties customers to the shop-floor.
Which is not to say that teams haven't been formed and Malcolm Baldrige awards haven't been won. Or that signs such as "No More Business As Usual" or "Quality Is Job One" haven't emblazoned many a cleaner shop floor. Some significant work culture shifts have taken place; but they are very few.
With all that we know can be accomplished through evolving team-based work cultures, it astonishes me that the wealth we spend in operations management is lavished on anything other than work culture. Or to put it differently, it's amazing that the culture that management winds up buying – through all of the choices made with never a thought to culture – somehow turns out to be full of surprises, puzzles, and questions: "Why did they have to vote in the union?" "Why don't they appreciate the fact that they even have a job?" "Why do they leave expensive tools lying around?" "Why don't they help each other more?" "Why don't they understand the concept of 'customer'?"
I could fill pages with what managers say about workers and even more with what workers say about managers – equally shortsighted and somewhat mean. But leaders and managers have left their work cultures to chance. Let the chips fall where they may as they bring in new equipment, announce new mandated levels of skills, infinitely reinstall new software systems.
Manufacturing management today still has given little thought and creativity to conscious culture-making. I'm sure that if companies could outsource work culture, they would – just like they outsource anything else that isn't a core competency.
Well, work cultures can't be out-sourced.
Those who fail to learn these culture lessons remain addicted to the heroic concept of leadership, perpetuating the losses in both human and real capital. Those who learn to behave less heroically – though it takes time to learn this – wind up closer to having the coveted learning organization, high-performing work teams, higher profits, and sustainability associated with being world-class.
There is some good news to report about work culture and change, although I'm afraid to share it too widely, given the blind spots about work culture and how easily site leaders let themselves off the hook. It's this: Work cultures rarely recognize it when they have adapted to change incredibly well over the years. They do not give themselves or their leaders the credit for their own historical responses to the global gauntlet to compete at even higher levels of excellence. Because they have no legacy of consistent feedback on performance, or consistent feedback on why customers want what they want, most workers truly believe "that we never follow through on great plans," when clearly they have triumphed time and again. They do not see their won quantum-leaps in business, quality, and safety.
This is the work-culture paradox: To the internal observer, things never change; to the outside observer, everything has changed – and mostly for the better.
Just imagine what would happen if internal site leaders actually learned the lessons of work-culture isolation and, instead of becoming experts on next-generation lean production methods, became masters of culture-making!
Sherrie Ford is a principal with Change Partners, L. L. C., an organization-change consulting firm based in Athens, GA. She is a member of the Southeastern Region board of directors of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence. Her e-mail address is: sherrieford@changepartners.com
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