STEREOTYPES

The other night I carried the dirty clothes down to the washing machine. I started putting them in but my wife stopped me. “Men don’t know how to wash clothes”, she told me and put them in herself. Me, I was happy to see that the WCOG (Worldwide Conspiracy Of Guys) was on the job. If women think we don’t know how to wash clothes, that is one less thing we will get tasked with. Now we need to work on convincing women we don’t know how to carry the basket.

This got me to thinking about stereotyping on the plant floor, which I see frequently. Some will stereotype others on the basis of job description, education, experience or other factors. I don’t think they mean anything bad by it and in many cases they may not even be aware that they are doing it. I suspect that all of us are guilty at some point. I certainly have been.

Take production operators: What do they know? They are just operators, after all. Too often they are treated as interchangeable drones. Sometimes there is reason for this, many times there is not. Operators are experts at what they do. They spend every day running their machine and in the course of this they gain a lot of expertise. Sometimes they do not realize that they have this expertise. Sometimes they are unsure of themselves. Other times they have been taught (usually not on purpose but taught just the same) to keep quiet.

This is not acceptable. Their expertise needs to be recognized and cultivated. Part of this is training. Operators may have been trained what to do and how to do it. Many times they are not trained why to do it. They need to know more than “pull this lever then push this button”. Some will figure it out on their own. Others may think they have figured it out but will have done so wrongly. Still others will have no idea why they are doing what they do and some of those won’t even care.

Operators with deeper understanding will be more productive. Most operators should be able to clear a minor jam and restart the machine. The operator with the deeper understanding may be able to understand why the jam occurred and prevent it from happening again. Alternately they may realize that a technician is required to adjust a setting or correct a fault.

When the technician gets to the machine, it may take them a while to figure out what is wrong. The more knowledgeable operator will be able to speed this process by giving a better explanation of the problem than a simple “The machine just stopped.” The knowledgeable operator will be able to explain what happened just prior and perhaps even the reason for the stoppage. The more info the tech has when starting, the faster and better the repair will be.

Your operators are, or should be, experts at their jobs. They must be treated as the valuable resource that they are.