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Primo Garcia is a customer success manager at Drishti. Primo brings his rich depth of manufacturing experience to customers, helping them deploy Drishti and successfully address uncovered opportunities so they make better business decisions.
The line worker has a crucial yet difficult role. The goal of the manufacturer is to build and deliver quality products in a timely manner, and the line worker carries out the base level task of actually building the products. The difficulty comes in terms of physical repetition and fatigue, management pressure and job satisfaction.
According to the Association for Manufacturing Excellence, the average manufacturer has an absenteeism and employee turnover rate of about 37%. In the U.S., the average turnover rate across all industries is about 3.6%. Obviously, manufacturing suffers from an abnormally inflated loss of jobs.
For line workers, the pressure to improve and deliver is high — long shifts made up of repetitive, but important, detail-oriented work can be demoralizing, particularly when there is no mechanism to recognize consistent good work. The pressure to deliver on time, and the disappointment of not meeting team goals are felt most by those doing the assembly tasks, with the consequences of missing deadlines too often carried by the line worker no matter who is at fault. While failures and wins are ostensibly a team effort, the need for a quick answer can sometimes lead to improper attribution of credit or blame.
All of these conditions can result in line workers leaving, or selecting a job in retail or warehousing over manufacturing.
Meanwhile, line workers are more critical than ever. If the world has shown us anything in the last several years it’s that adaptability is the key to surviving and thriving in uncertainty.. The most adaptable resource you have is your people. Today, 72% of assembly tasks are still done by hand. Shouldn’t we, therefore, be doing more to nurture and support the careers of these critical workers?
Three categories of problems
In manufacturing, generally speaking, most problems can be placed into three categories:
Part problems: Something is wrong with the raw materials being assembled or the tools and equipment being used to complete the task.
Process problems: The company’s official method of doing something is inadequate, poorly trained or unclear for repeatable, quality results.
People problems: Human error.
In my experience, the third kind of problem is relatively rare. I would argue that when the root cause is flagged as human error, the majority of the time, the other two categories are truly the underlying cause. Are the equipment, tools and parts adequate? Is the process effective, and has it been trained properly?
The vast majority of workers want to do a good job. They want to win. They want meaning and a career path, and they want to be valuable — and seen as such — by the team.
The problem is that it’s easier to blame a person than it is to blame a process or part. “Human error” is a catchall. Knowing this tendency, people will often try to solve their problems on the line on their own rather than ask for help and highlight that they are struggling. They do this with the best of intentions, thinking of the need to perform and “tough through it” in order to make the next goal or deadline. They want to avoid being perceived as the “weak link.”
Unfortunately, even when done with good intentions, this kind of activity can result in repeated problems. If the true root cause is never addressed, we can be confident that an issue will repeat itself, forcing the same workaround. We effectively plug our finger into another hole in the dam — eventually, the organization will run out of fingers.
How to solve the problem
Organizations largely recognize the importance of the line worker, but the numbers underscore the lingering problem of turnover in these demanding positions. To combat this, manufacturers can up-level the value of the line worker's job, helping him or her to succeed and see a career path.
Give workers a platform and voice for their problems
Many have experienced this issue — you go to a mechanic because your car is making a strange noise, but when you show up for your appointment, the noise stops. This is both frustrating and annoying because it brings your sense of credibility into question and you have no way of proving how the problem happened (or that it even existed), much less how to fix it.
The same is true of problems for the line worker. Spending each day trying to hit the numbers in a large operation means that there are a lot of problems that don’t get brought up. The worker doesn’t want their credibility brought into question and even if it isn’t, there’s often no quick way to assess or repeat their issue in order to fix it.
Drishti’s products are designed with this in mind. A worker can speak up about their issue with the assurance that there is video evidence backing them. The correct people can be notified with evidence in hand so the issue is both attributed to the right root cause and fixed.
Include workers in decision making, especially as it relates to the processes that they perform on the line
Who knows the process better than the individual who performs it over and over again? Drishti helps manufacturers include workers in defining their processes in two ways. First, Drishti flags high performers, those workers who have consistently shorter cycle times or regularly meet quality goals, and gives the line supervisor an opportunity to see what this “brilliant outlier” does differently. Second, with video to support every data point, line workers can clearly articulate when they’ve identified blockers that prevent them from accomplishing their tasks, such as station configuration issues, material shortages, and the like.
Give aids that inform, help train, and achieve their goals consistently
Training is one of the most important success factors in any employee’s tenure. In manufacturing, the need to bring employees up to speed on new processes is especially high. Changes in production have ambitious timelines attached. The faster a new employee can become effective at a task, the better the chances of hitting the company’s goals.
But training often ends too quickly. Training resources need to move on to the next need. We at Drishti believe that training should be available whenever it is needed. The Drishti platform allows employees to retrain a task as needed. There is a lot of nuance to even simple manufacturing steps, and even the most experienced line worker can use a refresher from time to time.
The Drishti platform makes training available as needed and is capable of showing the worker where they stand in terms of their performance — in which areas they are doing great and the areas where they could use support. Line workers can adjust their pace, continue to improve and ask for help in a better, more effective way to do a task.
Invest in the tools that help your workers
We need to change our understanding of ROI and get the right tools for the job. Drishti doesn’t just solve one part of the process; it makes the whole system more effective.
Drishti captures something that no other manufacturing technology can: the value and creativity of your workers. It is the first solution that can truly measure the efficacy of your process. It can point out places where your workers need improvement and can also show where your workers are outperforming the process. Drishti makes champions of your line workers and allows you to drive improvement with real data from the most critical place in the manufacturing business; the production floor.
When you make champions of your people and add value to their careers, the turnover rate improves and their careers extend. It is a compounding investment that sees improvements in quality and productivity, all while making your organization more adaptable.
For more on empowering workers, listen to our conversation with McKinsey on the topic.
