Thanks… From a Member
January 15th, 2007Mike and I would like to thank all of our members who spent time helping fellow member Alastair with his performance metrics challenge. But rather than paint the lily, we’ll let Alastair say it, from his comments to the original post:
Firstly may I say thanks for all the great responses. My thought processes are racing once more after having been stuck looking at the problem.
The main things that I take away from this brainstorming are:
Involvement: I can sit here and define indicators to the nth degree but without the involvement of the team in defining these there will be no buy in and therefore limited success.
Feedback: I think it can be very easy to underestimate the power of the feedback process, and as problems hit it can be very easy to focus on the negative behaviours with the result that positive feedback suffers.
Community: What a great sense of community this site is developing. I know where to come when I am stuck, and will gladly offer my two pennies worth when I think it will help.
A BIG THANK YOU to everyone out there!
Alastair
Thank you all. We’re excited you’re part of our community!
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January 15th, 2007 at 5:43 am
Having decided that you need feedback and get involved, what are you going to do next??
I believe you need to first look at avoiding being entangled with ‘unfair practices’ charges for whatever you decide to do subsequently.
Ideally, I would divide the 15 people into 3 teams (after having discuss with them). Peer pressure will take care of the laggards in each team for me. Teamwork will most likely produce the increase out put that I look forward for and to be fair, I will need to design a performance based reward system commensurate with the increased output.
Having just 3 teams will facilitate performance measurements (time start, time end, number of parcels handled, etc). You can have bin systems to actually measure each teams out put.
The ’soft-side’ must be measured also - wrongly seggregated parcels, damages, etc.
Now, for another angle to look at this problem! This is actually an operations problem. While I am not a die-hard Deming fan, my experience tells me that you could reap more benefits by looking at improved working conditions, work arrangements and factors such as:
ergonomics - do they need to bend and stretch unnecessarily in the course of their work? Do you have a system to stack the heavier parcels below and lighter/smaller ones above?
work study - the height for stacking, distance they need to move and layout of working area, etc.
I hope you find these ideas useful.