Crisis in the Womens Restroom

After making this realization, HR explodes into this story about how the girls restroom was almost out of toilet seat covers, and that this first group was free, but the cleaning service would charge us the next time, and we needed to make a decision if the women’s restrooms were going to have them or not!

All I could do was just stare at her... This was the emergency that pulled me away from my project?

Back to the floor...

Despite all of our improvements, we were slowly reaching a plateau. We have driven production to a new level for the site, but our success had yet to be tested by time or circumstance. It was important that we stay focused, and not be comfortable with our success. We had to stay hungry, and stay paranoid, and always keep looking over our shoulder.

The floor had other ideas…

As a management team, we reevaluated the barriers that were still negatively impacting the floor. We looked at the environment and realized that Us vs. Them mentality was alive and well, and the negative barn bosses were still wielding a tremendous amount of influence. We needed to increase our level of influence, and diminish theirs.

I had a dream...

We decided to take the struggle to the people and created an Employee Relation Committee. The committee was made of the people, for the people, and was designed to increase moral by giving the floor a voice. The "voice" was to act as a sounding board for the floor and create contests, and incentives to increase moral and allow us to negotiate past the Us vs. Them attitude.

The committee was to be nominated from the floor, and hold the position no longer than 3 months. I communicated the plan with the objectives clearly outlined, and initially received a very positive response. To kick off the process, I needed a starting point so I chose some of the more positive individuals on the floor to be apart of the process until the official nomination occurred.

The group was highly excited to participate, and I pulled them together for our first session. We brainstormed, threw ideas around, and had a very productive first session and ended up with a dry erase board full of ideas. We reviewed our objectives and ideas, and built a plan for implementation. The ideas were going to cost money so the first activity was to raise money, and secure funding. To accomplish this, the group decided to hold a bake sale with all money going into a fund.

The group would bake items, and get the floor to contribute items as well. The group left charged and excited, and I was feeling pretty good myself. I felt we were close to the break through that we needed.
Little did I know that this was the beginning of the end of our employee committee, and by the time it was all said and done, my call floor would be relationally torn in half.