First of all, I make a clear statement here,Aged employee not equals to senile employee! We must say, aged employee equals to experienced employee!
Agree?
By my last business trip to HuaDong, I visited a wire manufacturing plant in Shanghai. I experienced a story and I want to share it with my reader. During the audit of the wire supplier, we walked thourgh her workshop area and the image of many old, dusted and outdated manufacturing machine get into my eyes. Afterward, we walked to the testing laboratory, much clean, well 5S working place seen there. And then, we went back to conference to have a conclusion of the audit. We stated what is the improvement actions should be in placed and give them some suggestions on quality and management system. The CEO of that supplier gave us a reply liked this, "although our machines are old (outdated), our employee are old (senile), but we appreciated your comments and it is truth that we need to improve the quality and management system.". At that moment, the aged employee looked so regret but I felt so disappointed by his reply.
On the way to Putong airport, it is around one hour of transportation, it is a chance for me to talk about my feedback about his reply in conference room because his "old" employee are not on car. It is the first time I discussed the lean concept to the people out of my current company. I summarized the conversation as below,
"In lean concept, the machine will depreciate all the time in every second but not for people. Employee is value-adding all the time! They absorb experience and solve problem during their working time. The experience never depreciates or lost, experience can combine with their knowledge to form a concrete power to improve their work. Yes, sometime, their knowledge would be updated or covered by new technology, but company must provide the chance to catch up the new technology by training or let them to join seminar for new knowledge. Keep them in a learning atmosphere is a very important factor of company success. Trunaround to machine, it is no way to value-add in its value, no matter how good for the preventive maintenance we provided, depreciation is still there. You must change your mind!"
The CEO nodded! I don't know what will he do but it seen to me that he understood what I said.
In lean world, there are two most important spirits. "Continuous improvement" and "Respect to people". Without these, The "single piece flow", "standardization ", "eliminate wastes", ....etc are all bullshit!!!
Simple? but hard to do!
2 comments:
People can bring changes with their knowledge and experience but the knowledge and experience are also sometimes becomes obstacles for the change.
Peter, you are right! I can say, most of the time, especially for experience, was the obstacles for continuous improvment activities. They will set the block for the progress and always say, "from my experiance, it is not work..."
From my other post, I always emphasis the important to promote the culture change. If we have enough effort on the culture promotion. We can use their knowledge and experiance to support the change, otherwise, all the actions will be stop by those guys. Actually, many years ago, I was the guy you talked about but I am the guy to lead the change now.
From my point of view, if we find the problem as you said, it is a leadership problem, not the rich knowledge and experiance problem.
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