How much influence do bullies have on your shop floor? For instance, are they immediately dealt with, ignored entirely, or does your management simply allow them to go day-to-day, intimidating one co-worker after another? Perhaps you’ve yet to recognize their impact. Maybe you’ve rationalized that their influence is limited. Unfortunately, reality is entirely different. In fact, your management may coddle these individuals in the hopes that by appealing to their good nature, they’ll somehow change their ways and fall in line. Unfortunately, this rarely happens. So, what’s the solution?
Managing Difficult Production Employees
In the post, “manufacturing change management: isolating enemies of change,” I covered the importance of 1) rewarding good behavior, not bad behavior 2) identifying the bully’s followers - so as to limit their influence 3) creating allies for change by building stronger networks and finally 4) weeding out the bad apples and explaining the new reality to them. Each of these four steps are predicated on understanding how bullies impact your production, and how your management may be encouraging their behavior. So, how does your management typically handle a problem employee?
Understand the Issues
Most managers are either completely unaware, or simply choose to ignore, the impact of bullies on the shop floor. Again, some rationalize their impact, while others chalk up a couple of disagreements between employees to nothing other than that, disagreements. Furthermore, if they are aware of the issues, they tend to coddle the problem employee by continually giving them more interesting tasks and responsibilities. The idea is to find that one thing that will stop them from complaining and causing problems. Unfortunately, this goes against the first and most important rule; rewarding good behavior and not bad behavior.
The above video is from: Manufacturing Work Cell Optimization: Design, Layout and Analysis
Defining Good and Bad Behavior
In order to drive this point home, consider the following scenario. You have two employees; one who constantly does what’s required, and another who tends to cause friction. The first continually raises the bar on performance and never seems to complain when asked to take on a challenging task. However, this person is quiet, reserved and less inclined to boast about their capabilities. You see them as less assertive and perhaps nowhere near as engaged as they should be. However, you’re satisfied with them because they are the least of your concerns.
That second employee is brash, direct and in a word, difficult. They are always complaining and are rarely, if ever, satisfied. This is your problem employee.
“Which One Would You Prefer to Work With?”
Answering this aforementioned question is fairly easy. Working with the first employee is far more ideal than working with the second. However, in my experience, a large number of production managers coddle the bully, while ignoring the first. In fact, the problem employee is continually rewarded for bad behavior, while the first is never given additional opportunities. So, why does this happen?
In order to answer that last question, think of the manager’s perspective. Since the first employee never complains, it must mean that he, or she, is satisfied with what they’re doing. It’s one less problem to worry about, right? After all, if they were more assertive, then they’d complain just as often as the second. The employee is happy, so why change? As such, managers tend to focus on improving the behavior of the second employee. They hope that finding something challenging will help turn the employee around.
This rarely works. In fact, nothing ever satisfies the problem employee. One day that first employee leaves, followed by more good employees, ones who are tired of not being given the change. This often comes as a shock. After all, where were the warning signs? None were noticed and therefore, there was no reason to think that they would leave. This is ultimately how good employees leave and bad employees remain. It happens all the time. I see it first hand when I work with manufacturers who are trying to increase their production throughput. Again, I’ve included a link to that aforementioned article about change management in manufacturing. You want allies for change.
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