The problem you describe is a result of a SYSTEM that relies on hourly pay and active supervision (which are both intrinsically problematic).
Active stake holders (employee owners) don't act like "clock watchers".
Blaming individuals for SYSTEMIC FAILURE is exactly why SYSTEMIC FAILURE persists.
Not exactly. In one scenario we were told we would all be taught to set up our machines, this is how I learned to be a die setter. The object was that if taught to set up your own machine would mean you worked through out the day on your own, meaning you came in and either ran out the job already in your machine or set up a job in your machine. You were responsible to keep yourself busy with less supervision and direction. As a result over time there would be less need for supervisory and middlemen involved in daily operations, reducing cost, increasing productivity with less downtime. In essence you'd come in in the morning and your department would hold a team meeting, as a team you were responsible how to figure out how to as a team make this "impossible" dream a reality...yes that should be possible dream but in the end all the same systemic failures still existed because, once again, the objectivity for the vast majority of individuals is to go to work and do as little as possible not be as efficient as possible. All this did was let those who thrived on downtime pussy foot around all the more, they didn't care that keeping a machine up and running more than sitting involved more money through piece rate...that's because they had already found a way around fooling time study into rating a job at it's least minimum rate production without being to overly obvious what they were up to. That enabled them to run the job at full capacity once time study walked away maximizing their profit level in half the time set by time study allowing them ample time to spent half their day fooling around on "downtime" while still maximizing their bottom line.
Sometimes when the economy would go south we'd be sent into other area's of the plant or to other plants to work. I was sent to the assembly area once. My job was to put the hardware on office furniture doors on what they called the door line. The parts would come down from the paint line, what they called a set up person would take them down and place them on slotted rakes and roll them over to me for hardware. The doors came down according to orders placed by customers so if a door came down with a bad paint job the set up person would order three more doors to replace that door as a just in case scenario that one of of those three, if not all three, came down in better shape than the door missing from the order. Of course reordering another door came with pushing that particular piece of furniture off line to wait if the expediter couldn't find another door that color or size in a mixed up hodgepodge of carts accumulated around me of what they called overstock...overstock came from all the extra doors ordered to replace a bad paint job, if a job was a rush job sometimes the line came to a halt waiting for the expediter to search through all those doors to find a replacement and for me to put on the hardware. So one day during our "team meeting" I said to them hey guys you know if I took these carts, sorted them out, put on the hardware and we stacked two carts on top of each other then mark each aisle I made with the paint number and door sizes then the expediter would only have to run over and look at what's stored where, pull the door needed and we could minimize the shut down of the lines and eliminate having to pull anything off line to wait. By the looks on their faces you'd thought they thought I'd lost my mind...."what you mean no extra coffee breaks, lounging out back on the picnic tables, etc., have you completely gone mad", they didn't want anything to do with it. I went ahead and set it up myself. I even got so good at it I could look up and see what was coming down bad and have it at the ready when the expediter came looking. I became the envy of the plant manager who once said to me "you know it's like you can see what's going to happen before it happens"...but on the other hand I was the most despised member on my team.
You know it's a complex set of reasons why nobody ever figured that out before, something so easy, but coming to work wondering how much lounge time comes with the day, or things like when I first got there and asked the foreman what the rate was on my job he replied we could discuss it after work become your main motivators for even wanting to go to work can be blinding to efficiency. The only reason I ask what the rates were for jobs is because I know how the game is played, if they say take these two pieces together and do this I know that was done at a snails pace, there were very few jobs I couldn't make rate within the first hour on and usually those jobs entailed setting large heavy case bottoms into weld beds for welding assembly, I could do it but I'd also end up with carpal tunnel syndrome within a couple weeks yanking those heavy parts in and out of the bed....some things I have to admit are better suited for men.
You know how that round about came to be about?....it's not because teams work together more efficiently, it's because of odd balls like me who can't stop thinking about how to make something more efficient, it lays on their mind morning, noon and night. They are not the "normal" in the lot, they are the exception. I can't even tell you how many times I got pulled for hot jobs with airplanes waiting at the airport for the parts. That's because I understood the concept of how jobs got their rates...with the lease efficient most befuddled way to do it...once you figured that out it was like gold for the taking. You know you could ask most people I ever worked about and they'd tell you how much they hated me but on the other hand they'd have to admit when it came to efficiency I was bad to the bone.
You were fighting a system that incentivized inefficiency.
That's why you felt like an "odd ball".
Simply giving people "less supervision" does not equal "autonomy" (or "self-managed-teams").
HOLACRACY is a completely different system which incentivizes efficiency and innovation.
....to the same few with the same underlying dogma's.
Awesome vid.
HOLACRACY gives ALL members direct and meaningful organizational input.