The Begining of a Plan

My trainer’s loyalty, commitment, and sincerity seemed to be genuine. The reps loved him, and the staff respected him, but I could tell it would take an army to help keep that man organized. His method of organization involved placing all his papers in clean, neat, pile, and dropping them into an athletic duffel bag that he used as a brief case. I mean this bag was huge! When it came time for the transport, the size and weight was significant enough that he had to lean to the left counter-weight the bags heft. With his whole body committed to the lift, his face, and neck would strain forcing him to clench his cigarette in his teeth as he said good morning or good evening to all he passed. I liked this guy…

Inside was a piece of every class he had ever trained, or any program that he was ever apart of. Light some candles and burn some incense and this thing could have been a shrine to previous classes and former employee's. It was all in there.

My QA staff were stand offish, so the verdict was still out on these guys.

In the early weeks, I spent most of my time with my supervisors learning their strengths, opportunities, and how to effectively leverage them against the struggles at hand. I could tell that my morning supervisors had a strong bond with each other and with the support functions, but my closing sup seemed to be out of the loop all together. It's not uncommon for AM and PM shifts to have issues communicating. This was an easy fix. I pulled them together, and explained that when the evening sups come in, they need to have a 5-minute debrief from the AM sups to discuss real-time performance, current strategies, and any other type of floor impacting information.

When I pulled them together for the first debrief, I recapped what the objective was, and what needed to be communicated. I was shocked by what happened next. I had just finished the format review, and then they each extended their hands and shook. They had just officially met each other for the first time! While they knew each other, their need to shake hands and exchanged names represented a non-existent relationship.

All I could think was how this could be possible. How could you work in the same building, on the same project, manage the same indicators, and have never officially met. Once again, I was speechless.

Once of my first tasks was to set up and organize our reporting functions for absenteeism, performance, attrition, etc.. No type of internal reporting had ever been created. If you can measure it, you can improve it, and based on this, it was clear why performance was stagnant. Data was retrieved from two months prior to populate some absenteeism reporting in order to have some historical information for trending purposes.

This was the smallest site I had managed but it was clear this site had a disproportionately large absenteeism problem. Each rep level employee missed on average, 4 days per month.

I knew we had found a starting point...