In his fascinating Industry Week article How American Workers Became Disengaged, Michael Collins paints an alarming picture of the steady erosion of worker pay over the past 50 years. Nobody can deny that this is a major factor in demotivating workers, and the subsequent decline in productivity.
It gets worse, though. A more subtle aspect of this disengagement is the notion that paying workers is a necessary evil of doing business. Workers feel, and rightly so, that their employer not only doesn’t care about them, but would love to find a way to cut them out of the picture.
The irony here is that workers see all the inefficiencies that are harming their company’s competitive edge, but they are never asked for their opinion. Managers assume they have all the information they need from the financial reports – why listen to a worker who doesn’t understand the big picture?
The question is, how do we get out of this vicious circle? The short answer is we engage employees in driving out waste so that productivity increases, allowing the company to pay workers more.
If that sounds like some kind of pipe dream, we need to remember that many North American companies have accomplished this by adopting Lean methodology. In fact, Lean was originally developed because there was a desperate need to make enormous improvements in productivity with existing resources. And if you think that North American manufacturing can’t compete globally, tell it to Lean-practicing CEOs like Dan Ariens at Ariens Company, Jim Lancaster at Lantech, or Karl Wadensten at Vibco. Or better yet, join the thousands who visit their plants every year.
Lean rests on a leap of faith that if we invest in our workers, we will reap a positive return. Art Byrne, former CEO of Wiremold, said that workforce is the only asset that a company can have that appreciates.
At the end of the day, it’s where you put your trust. Will you trust what your computerized report is telling you about your operation, or will you listen to a group of engaged workers? I think history has proven that the latter is a better bet. Too bad it’s such a well-kept secret.
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