We have a management meeting every Wednesday morning. They have become pretty darned lively
although sometimes they sound a little bit out of control because there are
several people talking at once. The
interesting thing is, this tends to accomplish a whole lot pretty quickly. Even though polite schools of meeting management
believe that everyone should get a turn, that we should raise our hands and
that order and calm are the rule, I think that a good lively discussion helps
to relieve a whole lot of tension. Eventually
everyone winds up in agreement.
One of our recent meetings revolved around employee
damages. We understand that mistakes and
errors are inevitable in our business and we take full responsibility for the
quality of the decoration and ultimately, the apparel. Replacement costs for damaged apparel are
built into our budget. Of course, if we
can control those little attention errors that make up the majority of our
problems, we can add to our bottom line which really helps when calculating
year-end bonuses.
There are times,
though, when it seems that we have a plague of wrong colors, poor quality,
crooked logos and even holes cut by a finisher.
Those times test the patience and politeness of those of us in the
office. There really is no excuse for
that sort of problem
The trouble is, when these plagues begin, they
spread through the outstretched fingers of many of our staff who add their
little twists and slices to the list of ways that apparel can be ruined. Within a matter of days, repurchase of goods
seems to be higher than the good production that we turn out.
During past episodes, we have talked to the crew,
yelled at the crew and tried bonuses and time-off incentives to get them to
stop making mistakes. Eventually, the
error rate got back to normal and we breathed a sigh of relief.
The trouble is, these episodes act just like the common cold. No matter what positive or
negative response you throw at the gang, they always seem to last for the same
length of time. The cost varies although
in recent years it seems to have risen.
One interesting sidebar, by the way, is that the smallest employee has a
penchant for ruining anything size XX-Large or bigger. I can’t quite get my mind around the reason
for that one.
WARNING :
HORSE ANALOGY
Ray Hunt, a great horse trainer is credited with
saying that when you train a horse, it’s all about making the wrong thing
difficult and the right thing easy. If your
horse backs up and tends to move his rear end to the left every time, put him
next to a fence and he won’t be able to go anywhere but straight.
During our meeting, I stumbled on that concept. I won’t compare people to horses because that
would be unfair to the horses. I did,
however, find Mr. Hunt’s concept to be appealing. Instead of going out to the shop and stomping
our feet as we did in the past and instead of coming up with some reward system
for doing exactly the work that our staff is being paid to do, we looked for
another solution. In truth, it was
pretty simple.
If you do it right, you get paid. If you do it wrong and it has to be done
again, you do it on your own time.
I wish it were this easy to cure a cold.
