Jim Basch
1st February 2006, 05:35 PM
Per our conversation on strawberry packing, making a quick post on High Performance Work Systems aka Self-directed Work Teams, and some other names as well :)
Feel free to "google" for more depth, but basically, a high performance work system attempts to elicit commitment from workers as opposed to using a more command and control type structure. The concept dates back well into the 20th century so it's not new by any means.
I applied the concept at a semiconductor capital equipment mfg'r a couple years ago when I was a team leader working w/about 15 test technicians. I proposed that cost of training the techs to work in this new system would be well covered by the increase in throughput that we would see (see "financial metrics" thread details on cost/benefit analysis).
At the end, we had a very good quarter at the company but there was no way to attribute the success directly to our high performance work system as there were so many other groups involved. I did measure our employee satisfaction against other groups and job satisfaction was higher, but alas no hard evidence using financial metrics.
One thing that we did notice though was that labor efficiency seemed to improve as it took less techs to test and calibrate our product. So instead of 1 tech working on 1 product at a time, we found that 1 tech was working on 2 to 3 products at a time.
Since this experiment, we have been fine-tuning our approach to applying high performance work systems in our mfg environment focusing on improving labor costs and efficiencies and we have a lot to learn. I've also tried to incorporate gain sharing into all this where the company shares the financial benefits of cost efficiencies and profit gains with direct labor but will save that one for now :)
Also of interest, the increased efficiency implies loss of jobs, but actually, since implementing, rather than seeing a net loss of jobs, we have added or are in process of adding different, more challenging jobs. Too, many team members have been able to move into some new challenging roles as well and we've hired more people. Of course I defer to macro econ influences here as well but maybe we can cautiously say "limited success" with this.
Maybe there are some implications for other industries or not-I defer to my fellow seminar members on this. And too, looking forward to learning from our continued coversations. thx, Jim
Feel free to "google" for more depth, but basically, a high performance work system attempts to elicit commitment from workers as opposed to using a more command and control type structure. The concept dates back well into the 20th century so it's not new by any means.
I applied the concept at a semiconductor capital equipment mfg'r a couple years ago when I was a team leader working w/about 15 test technicians. I proposed that cost of training the techs to work in this new system would be well covered by the increase in throughput that we would see (see "financial metrics" thread details on cost/benefit analysis).
At the end, we had a very good quarter at the company but there was no way to attribute the success directly to our high performance work system as there were so many other groups involved. I did measure our employee satisfaction against other groups and job satisfaction was higher, but alas no hard evidence using financial metrics.
One thing that we did notice though was that labor efficiency seemed to improve as it took less techs to test and calibrate our product. So instead of 1 tech working on 1 product at a time, we found that 1 tech was working on 2 to 3 products at a time.
Since this experiment, we have been fine-tuning our approach to applying high performance work systems in our mfg environment focusing on improving labor costs and efficiencies and we have a lot to learn. I've also tried to incorporate gain sharing into all this where the company shares the financial benefits of cost efficiencies and profit gains with direct labor but will save that one for now :)
Also of interest, the increased efficiency implies loss of jobs, but actually, since implementing, rather than seeing a net loss of jobs, we have added or are in process of adding different, more challenging jobs. Too, many team members have been able to move into some new challenging roles as well and we've hired more people. Of course I defer to macro econ influences here as well but maybe we can cautiously say "limited success" with this.
Maybe there are some implications for other industries or not-I defer to my fellow seminar members on this. And too, looking forward to learning from our continued coversations. thx, Jim