Is Your Company Blaming the Wrong People for Low Productivity?

By Ted Garrison

When quality slips or deadlines aren't met whom do you blame? Do you blame the workers? If you do, you aren't alone. In most companies when things go wrong on a project the mechanics are blamed. I constantly hear comments that workers aren't as good as they used to be. Unfortunately, it's a myth that today's craftspeople are the source of the industry's production problems.

George Eckes reports in his book, Six Sigma for Everyone, that statistics indicate the portion of performance variation that people are responsible for is from 5 to 15 percent. The other items that contribute to variances include machines, methods, materials, measurement and Mother Nature. All of these except Mother Nature are the responsibility of management, not the worker.

A Construction Industry Institute study determined that the average construction worker achieves about 40 percent productivity. The Institute's analysis found that 20 percent - one-third of the loss - of the potential productivity was due to waiting on materials, 20 percent was due to poor systems, and 15 percent was due to poor scheduling and work rules. Additionally, only 5 percent was due to the workers. Therefore, 55 percent of potential productivity is lost due to management.

The simple fact is that most production problems are a result of poor management, not poor worker performance. A recent story involving spiral duct provides an example.

When I was preparing a presentation to the Spiral Duct Association, my research about the group revealed a recent problem a project had experienced with the installation of spiral ductwork. Contractors complained about the workers' problems with the product. Further research uncovered the problem - management.

Apparently, many contractors received separate price quotes on the ductwork and the connectors and purchased each from the lowest priced source. Unfortunately, the various manufacturers' products are not totally compatible. Therefore, the effort to save a few material dollars resulted in increased labor to install the non-compatible materials. While each manufacturer met the nominal size, the slight variations in size created problems in assembly when parts were interchanged.

Despite the material issues, however, the workers were still blamed. Typical comments included, if the mechanics were topnotch they could deal with this problem. However, this problem is not about the skill level of the mechanics, but of the quality of the material.

Another problem is how to measure the performance of the individual worker. Every system has built-in to it some variation of performance. This is especially true in construction, because of the variations in working conditions, such as weather, lighting, work configuration, and many more. These variations will impact the performance, but these variations they cause are system variations, not worker variations. The better a system the less variation it will have, but there will always be some variation. If management wants less variation, then it's their responsibility to redesign the system.

The key to evaluating a worker's performance is to compare how his or her performance fits within the system's natural performance. If the system is stable, and all the workers are performing within the statistical range, additional training will not help because the workers are already doing their job correctly. The variation is not due to their performance, but the system's built-in variation. In other words, if management wants overall performance to increase, then it must do its job and improve the system.

In closing, if management wants to see improvement in productivity, then it must improve its performance and stop blaming the workers.

Ted Garrison, author of Strategic Planning for Contractors, works with businesses in the construction industry. He can be reached at Growing@TedGarrison.com.