Stop Watches Belong At Track Meets, Don't They?

The supply chain world appears to have been seduced by Labor Management Systems (LMS) and performance/productivity standards for the past couple of years.  That's cool enough; we all know that measurement is important and that goals are vital.

Lately - as late as last Tuesday - more attention is being paid to how standards are set, with a recent article waxing rabidly enthusiastic on matters of changing methods, changing work pace, and engineering alternatives.  The - as usual - missing ingredient was any inclusion of how to get a workforce to embrace and engage the use of performance standards and labor management systems.

Disclosure: I spent two decades doing little else but developing and implementing labor management systems in a spectrum of industries and environments.  I can attest that, while a winning personality can help achieve labor management success in the short term, there is no substitute for an organized and focused effort to include the workforce in the process, to get not merely buy-in, but to achieve sustainable participation.

Imposing standards and a program on people smells entirely too much like the bad old days of gimlet-eyed "efficiency experts" and speed-up efforts to wring more output from an over-stressed and under-motivated workforce.  Picture battalions of industrial engineers (many of them self-taught), armed with clip-boards and stop watches and treating workers like so many replaceable parts in the machinery of production.

Seems like we ought to know by now that left-brain solutions to whole-brain problems are not recipes for happiness, for either labor or management.  The logical extension of business relationship concepts ought to recognize that solid - and well-maintained - relationships with individuals are part of the foundation for building relationships with organizations.  And for building positive, continuously improving, labor management programs.