The Hidden Reason Why Workers Leave

When you watch an expert packaging operator at work, what is she doing? You may see the line running smoothly, without a hitch or with only slight glitches. You could easily be lulled into the false assumption that that job is easy. That it doesn't take much skill to stand at a line and watch product get packaged. If this is your impression, you'd be very wrong.

When you watch this person work, she seems so economical. She makes it look easy, like there's not much to the job. Yet, just like a seasoned director who makes running a plant or a department look like anyone could do it, there’s an intelligence behind the apparent simplicity.

Working a line position takes memory work, knowledge, facility, and a experienced play of attention. It takes a vigilance to zoom through the work, not missing a lick, while tracking a multitude of safety, quality and flow variables. What’s going on is that they’re prioritizing the different things they have to do to keep the line running smoothly, while avoiding the known pitfalls. If you don’t cluster certain tasks together, or respond in a finessed way, you’re going to run yourself ragged or get derailed. There’s a real efficiency that emerges in the middle of the action. Experts know this, many bosses don't.

Sustaining this kind of work takes a special blend of formal training and hands-on experience. Expertise gets built, strategically and uniquely, per company and per job. While classroom programs help augment the necessary knowledge base that informs the work, skill gets developed with hands-on practice and coaching that develops technique and smarts — essential to the heart of your business.

Yet, this skill-build doesn't happen by itself. In fact, many companies have relied on new workers “Sitting by Arnold,” or getting thrown into the deep end as a standard training delivery method. This reliance on an ineffective training method does not help line staff develop vital core skills. Ignoring or de-prioritizing keeping line workers in tip-top skill shape is like letting the Creeping Charley into your garden. Before you know it, all your grass and all your beds have been infiltrated by the aggressive weed. What this looks like on the plant floor is blame shifting, one shift leaving all the scut work for the next, your trainers complaining that new people just can't learn, workers moving away from the "hard" station and taking lesser jobs just to relieve their stress, one or two people looking like the heroes and others looking like they are failing. Standard work is obscured. Supervisors are endlessly fire fighting.

There are many symptoms of disengagement and nearly 100% of the time, the solution is not about fixing your people, but taking a look at your people, processes, and systems of learning and improvement.

There’s giftedness in every occupation, in a plumber or a painter or a waitress or a line worker. There is a mix of skill, intelligence, sophisticated knowledge, judgment and instinct that’s gets honed by focused practice. Often, inattention to the detailed work has a cascading effect. Like Creeping Charley, it chokes out the practical application of standard work and seeps into management, until people no longer recognize that the work ecosystem has deteriorated at its roots. People, increasingly unmotivated, are a symptom of systems rot.

And, in the pandemic economy, the labor market has tipped in the favor of the worker.

Getting this dynamic mix aligned and nourished what we call designed engagement.

If this reflection sparks a cord, click the Let’s Talk button above— and let’s exchange ideas.