Back when I was a line supervisor in a production facility, I had a cubicle adjacent to the production floor for an office. One day a young lady from a neighboring department named Bernadette appeared in the doorway, wanting to report “an incident”. I listened as she described for me how one of my employees, Debra, had confronted her in the ladies room one day and threatened her. Where Bernadette was slender and about twenty years old, Debra was larger, older and a bit of a bully. Well, at least known to push her weight around with the other women. When Bernadette was finished reporting the incident, I asked her what she would like me to do. Exasperated, she said, “I want her reprimanded!”
I asked her who else was in the ladies room with her at the time. She told me Debra and one of her friends were the only other people in there with her. I asked her if she thought that Debra would believe that her own friend had come and told me this story. She said, “Of course not. Why?”
I explained that if I said something to Debra about this particular incident, I doubted Bernadette would last 5 minutes in the parking lot after work. I asked her if she was willing to take that chance to have the woman reprimanded. When I saw the look on her face change, I said, “I thought not.”
I thanked her for coming to see me and told her that I was not going to forget about this incident, I just wanted to handle it in my own time and asked if she would be okay just leaving it with me. She assured me she was fine with that and went back to work. I began paying attention to Debra that day waiting for an opportunity to make a point using something that I observed myself. I didn’t have long to wait.
Three or four departments use the same exit to the parking lot after work and that means that they line up at the same time clock waiting for the shift to officially end so they can punch out and go home. This particular day Debra walked up to a place near the front of the line and started joking with a few of her friends who were already there. Apparently another woman said something about cutting in and Debra shoved her. I didn’t hear what was said but I did see the shove. I walked up to Debra and told her she needed to line up at the back of the line like everybody else. She looked at me like she was not too pleased. I knew if I waited very long for her to respond properly the buzzer might sound, the line would start moving rapidly toward the exit and the moment would be lost. I think she was counting on that. I said, “Look, I can write you up for this or you can just apologize and get to the back of the line. You can’t be shoving people in the line.”
She mumbled something about “…’scuse me” in the general direction of the woman she had shoved and started moving down the line. The buzzer sounded and the moment was over. I don’t know if she ever made it to the actual back of the line or not but that wasn’t the point. I had started paying attention and I wasn’t planning on stopping anytime soon.
The next day there was a mild argument on the floor between two of the women. Just raised voices, not much more. I came out of my cubicle and could see across the floor that Debra was one of the two women arguing. I went over and told the other one to go back to her work and asked Debra to explain what happened and why the argument was going on. It may not sound like much, but the assemblers are on a piece work rate and if they can maintain the rate or better it, they can make a little extra money over their regular rate. Whatever the argument was, if the other woman is back to work, she has the possibility of making her rate. With every moment that is passing that Debra can’t get back to work, she may be losing her opportunity to make piece work.
When she finished explaining to me how the other woman had said or done this or that, and how she had to respond like she did, I explained to her that I didn’t think that (whatever it was) was a good enough reason to stop production, and did she think she could get back to work and take it up during break time or after work? Incidentally, if you have never worked in a production environment, willfully stopping production can be an offense and you can get written up for it if you didn’t have a good reason (like quality control) for causing it to stop. She didn’t and agreed to go back to work, which she was more than happy to do immediately.
As you may well imagine, a few more of these incidents and Debra was pretty sure if she stepped out of line she would hear about it. But I really felt that Debra had potential. She was very good at the work that she did and I was sure at some level she must be proud of it. I decided to start finding reasons to pay attention to her when she wasn’t causing trouble and my first opportunity came sooner than I expected.
I asked her to help in training one of the new girls that was having trouble catching on to work that Debra happened to be very good at. There was an incentive for training someone that was like making your piece work rate because it would have been difficult to get people to want to train others properly if they were “losing money” by doing it. I was kind of surprised how well it went but then again I had made a big deal of how I wanted the new girl to learn the job right and that’s why I was asking Debra to train her.
So, things turned around with Debra generally and she stood out less and less over the next several months for having a bad attitude and a little more for being an asset to the department. Like the time I made a decision to let the piece of equipment that Debra was using run a little longer before maintenance and it started producing product that was out of spec and would not pass the QC line check, which meant that it went back to the operator for rework. This of course kills any piece work rate that the operator would have been hoping to achieve. This was not the first time I had literally pushed the machine until it ran out of spec in production. This particular machine would not hold the proper adjustments and would probably need to be redesigned to work differently and I had not wanted to take it out of production. That decision had caused the quality issue and rework.
Hank, my department manager was out on the floor one day in Debra’s work area with Debra and the QC technician and called me over. He showed me the parts and explained that he wanted engineering to redesign this machine to perform this process without running out of spec so often. It is entirely possible that Debra had gone over my head to Hank on this because she was frustrated with yet another QC rejection and rework. In fact, I was pretty sure she did when she said to me, “Mike, I just want these parts to get on down the line and get on about they business and not come back!”
It didn’t make any difference how it happened because he was out here now and the machine was going to have to be pulled and engineering was going to have to be involved before we could get any more production through this area of the line. Well, it was the right thing to do and my boss had just laid it out for me and of course I made it happen.
It was maybe a few months after that that I was promoted to manage the technical marketing team that worked with our national and key accounts in a different building. Of course that had nothing to do with Debra’s story or anything on the production line. I worked in a technical marketing, marketing and customer service capacity at two different facilities of ours over the next few years and it was several years later that I was asked to manage the Quality department. As fate would have it, I came back to the Quality office in the same area of the building in which I used to supervise production out of that cubicle. I could even see my old cubicle from my office door.
When the supervisory staff and engineers of the Quality departments assembled in the conference room to discuss planning and direction under the new manager, I remember telling them that day, “Most of you know my roots are in the manufacturing side of the operation. In fact, my whole understanding of the Quality initiative here is that we want the product we manufacture to get on down the line, out to our customers, and not come back!”
