Impact of "People Under Pressure" on Improvement and Production

Hello!!!

Friends

I think that with staff shortages becoming an accepted way of life in most ofoperations, it is harder than ever to accomplish the important tasks with fewer people. Ultimately, lack of people could become the biggest bottleneck to production worldwide, making employee satisfaction and retention one of the most important areas of focus in the future.

According survey statistics about worker satisfaction indicated that an improved work environment would increase staff retention and overall worker satisfaction.
If companies are serious about increasing employee satisfaction and retention rates, they must be willing to address all the factors that make employees consider leaving a company. It is also important to recognize that established practices of “running short of people” or “running lean and mean” year after year often undermines production and production capacity due to a lack of people to execute/monitor key processes or tasks.

According to me Pressure is one of those unseen and unmeasured factors that subtly threaten an operation’s ability to improve and its ability to sustain production into future years.

The Chronic labor shortages exacerbate “pressure to perform”, lower job satisfaction, morale, and retention rates. Let’s further explore pressure to understand how its fingers touch an organization’s processes and performance from behind the scenes.
According to Webster’s dictionary, pressure is defined as “the application of continuous force” or “a compelling influence”.

A pressured workforce can become very reactive to problems; over time, “reactive” may even feel normal. When reactive feels normal, the culture moves towards acceptance of substandard work, substandard oversight of processes, and sub­optimal performance.

When employees no longer believe they can deliver consistent high quality work given the resources at hand, they may measure success on “how fast they respond to breakdowns” instead of how well they prevent breakdowns.


Impacts on Improvement and Production

Pressure and Project Selection

I had seen that to improve the efficiency and cost structure of mining and downstream conversion processes. These teams consist of mobile and fixed plant equipment operators, maintenance technicians, belt crews, purchasing and warehouse personnel, supervisors, superintendents, department heads and site managers. Projects that come out of these teams are assigned by management or identified as opportunities by a team. It has been my experience that employees that are satisfied with their jobs will suggest different improvement projects than employees that are not.

Unhappy employees usually suggest two different kinds of projects that happy employees do not suggest:
1) projects to raise work standards to meet their own personal standards of excellence
2) projects to improve communications and information exchange.

It is important to note that managers of these employees will not usually list these projects. Management’s focus is usually equipment ­related because managers are always accountable for equipment performance and production but may be less accountable for the execution of processes that link the workforce to production equipment.

Equipment is more likely to be operated and maintained according to plan when people consistently perform at their best under pressure.

Efficient workflow and communications have high value when people are working under pressure, but projects to improve them are usually ranked lowest in importance.

Pressure and Improvement Teams

To maximize opportunities to improve with limited resources, it is important to raise awareness about these pressures and their connection to improvement.

There are list of success factors for improvement of teams and management teams involved in implementing / sustaining improvement programs. Pressure negatively impacts all of these factors:

· Management communications with each other, with teams and the workforce.
· Execution of action plans (team members, departments and managers).
· Expectations that teams will find “quick fixes” so that they can “get back to work”.
· Beliefs about an organization’s ability to capture opportunities.
· Beliefs about management’s responsiveness to change.
· Management’s involvement in sustaining their improvement program.
· Team priorities that differ from management’s priorities.
· An expectation that teams can fix problems without management involvement.


Summary
To conclude the strategies that increase employee satisfaction and retention rates will have increasingly higher values. We can say that links between staff shortages, execution of management processes, organizational barriers, and process improvement work, managers can place the proper emphasis on projects that help “relieve the pressure” to secure resources needed for future production.