Joe once worked in a long-established factory in an East Coast city. One of his responsibilities was new employee orientation. For months he struggled to introduce trainees to the basics of their work: what the factory made and how those products were used, how to use simple instruments, how to make quality products, how to safeguard their health and fingers around serious metal-working equipment.
Joe's work was a bit frustrating, mostly because the new employees were - how can Joe put this delicately - truly stupid. Now, you will see this blog carry on later about how wrong it can be to make assumptions about anyone's intelligence from his or her appearance, but this was a different thing. These folks were lovely people - kind, generous, funny, eager to work - but absolutely bovine in education and intelligence. They did not know basic arithmetic, let alone fractions or decimals - bits of knowledge essential to the correct setup and operation of the equipment they had been hired to run. Teaching them simple addition and then the long division they would have to be able to do rapidly in their heads, began to take up more and more of Joe's (and therefore the company's and the employees') time, to the detriment of getting the products out the door.
Men and women who had worked in this factory for decades were baffled: they were responsible for providing the on-the-job portion of new employees' training, and found it almost impossible. Foremen and superintendents asked, "Is THIS the best I can get? Jeepers!" Management shook its head and sighed, and did nothing further.
In his puzzlement, Joe finally went to the human resources manager to ask why these folks were being hired. That manager told him, with fierce sincerity, "Factory work is cruel and dehumanizing. This place is one of the pits of hell. Intelligent, clever, ambitious people do not want to work in this ugly, noisy, dangerous place, getting their hands dirty. So I hire what I can get."
Joe trekked back to report to the foremen and superintendents, who shook their heads. Management sighed and did nothing further. And Joe himself could hardly complain, when they wouldn't, about hiring practices that favored the extremely-hard-to-employ.
Flash forward a couple of months. The human resources manager left. Her replacement was a woman who found the factory fascinating and the products beautiful. Suddenly the new hires coming to orientation were intelligent, clever and ambitious people who loved to work with their hands, and get dirty. And yes, they could already do long division in their heads, thank you very much, and what a nifty set of instruments we get to work with! How does this one work, Joe, and what does it do? Ah, I see. What about this one? Cool, got it. When do I start? What else can I learn?
Did productivity and quality suddenly improve overnight? This isn't a fairy tale so the answer is no. But several different foremen lost that haunted look. Joe actually saw - for the first time in a long time - superintendents engaged in intense three-way conversations with one of these new workers and one of the very old timers, with all interlocutors looking deeply interested and satisfied. Senior workers realized that they could pass on all that they knew and their accumulated wisdom would be safe with newer workers who could explain what they did, and why they did it that way - and could present well-reasoned arguments for tweaking the system.
Life for everyone got a tick better. All because of what one person who never set foot on the shop floor did and did not believe.
And the moral of this story is --- Oh, come on. You tell me!
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