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People today do not want to write. To ask them to write anything down is asking for trouble if you really desire good feedback. When given the choice, they will write very little or the bare minimum. An alternative to get better information on a daily basis is allowing those employees to record observations verbally on the telephone before they leave.
Forget the pencil; record comments from your employees. Get production updates from your workers recorded every day and you will get more and better input. Because it is easier for them to speak to you this way, they will talk longer and most likely tell you more of what they observe. You will get far less if you ask them to write it down. Most employees do not think in terms of writing and thus do not write. Avoid asking for written details from production workers; ask them to record their observations verbally. If you want daily ongoing production updates from employees, give them the opportunity to record messages verbally before changing jobs or clocking out, maybe using a recording device near the time clocks or near the foreman’s office.
Record your messages versus writing because of the ease. Why ask them to record versus writing comments down? The main reason is the ease for the worker. You cannot mandate feedback; you can only encourage it and make it as easy as possible.
If given a choice, most choose talking. Many employees if given a choice between writing and talking will choose speaking. They may be unsure of their writing skills. They may feel they do not do well when documenting anything. Many do not have English as their native language.
You want immediate feedback, regardless of the method used. Your primary goal is to get feedback about what is holding up or delaying production. No one said good feedback could not be recorded. Your employees leave voicemails now every day on telephones. They are used to this method of communicating. Leaving a recorded message may be more normal and easier for some than putting words and thoughts into written sentences with words they do not know how to spell. If given an option, they will not write it. Now you might be able to get them to speak it. Make it easy to get their feedback.
How to report by recording voice messages about problems or daily production issues:
- Before clocking out, go to the designated place with telephones near the time clock.
- Pick up a telephone and wait for a prompt to record the message.
- Identify yourself by complete name and employee ID number.
- Identify your problem machine, problem tooling, missing job, parts or components.
- State the problem (i.e. bad material, bad machine, bad products, department problem like QC or receiving, short of staff, missing tools, missing material, forklift driver, missing supplies, electrical outage, gas line disrupted, missing supervisor, plant theft, water problem, severe thunderstorm or tornado or weather incident).
- Leave a reminder (i.e. tooling to be fixed by tomorrow, material to be moved, material to be cut, components to be received by deadline, driver to bring parts, waiting for paint, belt broken on machine and needs expediting).
- Hang up.
- Assigned person checks for messages and relays them to the correct department (i.e. maintenance for outages, inventory for missing stock or stock problems or flaws that need to be relayed to suppliers, inadequate instructions from inside sales for what the customer ordered, etc.).
Here are examples of what you might hear in recordings that you would not if written. They may say it quickly and will be more likely to speak up rather than try to write it down before leaving their shift.
Examples of feedback you may get:
- Machinist: Ronnie Miller. Machine 12 is acting up again. It is the components that do not fit and are jamming the machine. Somebody in Purchasing needs to get their money back from ABC Parts Corp… those parts are lousy and do not fit. They came in at noon and no one in quality control checked them. Also I told maintenance last week, but Doug, the foreman, forgot to order spares for the belt on the bottom on this machine. Someone needs to overnight these or we will be down for three days.
- Housekeeping: This is Sandra. I am cleaning the office at 7:30 p.m. and noticed that there is water all around the electrical circuitry at the back of the conference room when I was sweeping. We also need pest control to come in again; there are signs of cockroaches in the cupboards in the kitchen again. I told purchasing a month ago and she said for me not to worry. I am.
- Production worker: This is Alexander Waltrin. I just left after my shift and again noticed a guy across from the parking lot who does not work here just sitting along the street outside the fence in his car alone. He looks like he is up to no good. I have seen him now three times I remember over the past two weeks; License 568-GHY, white four door sedan, Camry, maybe. If I had to guess, he is watching to see when we are gone; maybe to steal something after hours? I don’t know but if you notify the neighborhood patrol, I bet he doesn’t come back.
- Machinist: This is Henry White. I need the tooling on the back assembly line retooled for the new job we are running on Friday. That is supposed to be out by Monday for a new customer so if this tooling does not get changed, it is not my fault. I tried to find the supervisor, but I don’t know where he is and the guard has been gone for over two hours tonight off the premises; second time this week but probably no one knows about this.
- Production worker: This is Walter Allen. I stopped the production on machine 154 because it is out of alignment and ruining 30% of the parts. I need maintenance to correct the machine before tomorrow. I cannot find them and my supervisor told me to go home. I have done what I am supposed to.
- Receiving technician: This is Juan Alvarez. The material you bought from the new vendor is bad; it is marked up inside the roll and can only be seen when you open up the packaging. It looks like the same roll we sent to them but rolled the opposite way. I kept the bad pieces from the batch and put them back in quality control because someone told me we get our money back from the vendor. Is that right? I do not know what they are doing because they passed the material when it came in, but that was wrong.
- Production worker: John Marshall on Machine 256. It is 6:00 p.m. and the machine stalled and then quit. We had a power outage from about 5 to 5:50 p.m., third one this week, so maybe that is what is wrong? I do not know. I called the supervisor and he told me to go home. Also, the bathroom is flooded. The driver of the last truck today went in there and I think got mad because he had to wait and deliberately stopped up one of the toilets. I am certain that it was him because he told two people before he left. His truck was labeled, “Albany Parts Service”, license plate 456-TYL. He has caused problems here before; a year or two ago before you guys had this recording installed. Good idea.
Get messages to the appropriate departments to handle. Send all daily messages to the production supervisor for review, handling or forwarding. You might consider having them all sent to the production supervisor’s office for review first. While listening to his operators’ messages, he might want to forward them appropriately to maintenance, quality control, receiving, shipping, etc.
Encourage employees when they participate; do not criticize. Of course, to continue to get good feedback, employees should be encouraged to leave messages and not be censored on what they say when it comes to departments not performing, jobs being delayed or substandard material or products ruined by machines needing repair.
Duplicate the message outside of production. One way to ensure that messages do not get erased or ignored is to copy other pertinent departments of your choosing. You decide who needs to hear the problems. (i.e. poor design issues copied to engineering, flaws in purchased material copied to purchasing, shortages of inventory reported to inventory personnel, employees poorly trained or mismanaged copied to your managers).
Remember that the more employees are reprimanded for what they leave on the messages, the fewer messages your company will receive.
