If you want people to work faster, set the pace for them.
The summer after high school, I worked on a fish processing ship in the Bering Sea. I stood in front of a belt of trays, and put the fish into the trays, heads down and belly to the right. I put 120 fish in the trays every minute, because that’s how many trays went in front of me every minute. Nobody ever told me it was an option to go slower - the machine set the pace. Empty trays went by me, and I knew exactly what was expected of me.
Five years later, a farmer put me on a transplanter pulled behind an International 504. The 504 didn’t have a creeper gear, although it did have a “torque amplifier” that slowed it down. When I told Richard that he was driving too fast for me to possibly keep up, he replied that the tractor was going as slow as I could go. The empty pockets on the transplanter told me very clearly what I needed to do. So I learned to keep up, and to do what the machine expected of me.
The water wheel transplanter that I bought at Rock Spring Farm didn’t help our fastest workers set plants any faster. But it set the pace for slower workers, and encouraged them to keep up. The empty holes in the soil were there to be filled, so the holes got filled before they disappeared behind the workers.
Empty trays, missed pockets, and blank holes create a dissonance for workers that moving slowly down a field doesn’t.With a machine, the feedback is baked right into the system. Workers see, second by second, exactly what the expectations are for the speed of their work. It provides a far more immediate feedback than counting how many beds or bunches are completed every hour.
(The same thing can be accomplished without a machine if you provide shoulder-to-shoulder leadership to your workers. When you work alongside your employees to show them how fast and how well a job can be done - and continue to do so while the job gets done - you create much the same effect as the empty trays on the filet machine belt.)
The summer after high school, I worked on a fish processing ship in the Bering Sea. I stood in front of a belt of trays, and put the fish into the trays, heads down and belly to the right. I put 120 fish in the trays every minute, because that’s how many trays went in front of me every minute. Nobody ever told me it was an option to go slower - the machine set the pace. Empty trays went by me, and I knew exactly what was expected of me.
Five years later, a farmer put me on a transplanter pulled behind an International 504. The 504 didn’t have a creeper gear, although it did have a “torque amplifier” that slowed it down. When I told Richard that he was driving too fast for me to possibly keep up, he replied that the tractor was going as slow as I could go. The empty pockets on the transplanter told me very clearly what I needed to do. So I learned to keep up, and to do what the machine expected of me.
The water wheel transplanter that I bought at Rock Spring Farm didn’t help our fastest workers set plants any faster. But it set the pace for slower workers, and encouraged them to keep up. The empty holes in the soil were there to be filled, so the holes got filled before they disappeared behind the workers.
Empty trays, missed pockets, and blank holes create a dissonance for workers that moving slowly down a field doesn’t.With a machine, the feedback is baked right into the system. Workers see, second by second, exactly what the expectations are for the speed of their work. It provides a far more immediate feedback than counting how many beds or bunches are completed every hour.
(The same thing can be accomplished without a machine if you provide shoulder-to-shoulder leadership to your workers. When you work alongside your employees to show them how fast and how well a job can be done - and continue to do so while the job gets done - you create much the same effect as the empty trays on the filet machine belt.)
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