- Feeding the Hog!
In my last post I mentioned that I was going to tell about a decrease in productivity and the story of “Feeding the Hog” which I heard from the Esteemed Dan Mollaun V.P. of Human Resources with Roto Rooter.
The story goes like this, once upon a time there was a large sawmill that turned logs into lumber and the company had been family owned for about 100 years.
Well finally the family sold the highly profitable sawmill to a large corporation. The corporation sent in a group of young MBA type agressive managers who rode hard over the employees and the managers who had been there for decades.
This kind of behavior went on for several months and after a while the corporate headquarters figured out that the sawmill was no longer profitable. There had developed a noticeable decrease in productivity. However they could not put their finger on what was wrong and observed for several months as profits continued to decline. This became such a problem that the corporate headquarters hired an undercover detective to come work at the sawmill to try and discover if there was massive theft or find out what was causing the losses.
After several weeks working in the sawmill the undercover employee was invited to the local bar for drinks by some of the employees. While at the bar he was informed that the new management had taken away some benefits and paid time off from the employees, and to add humiliation had been very heavy handed and rude to the employees. So to prove to the corporation that they couldn’t get away with the treatment that was going on the two shifts, night shift and day shift had developed a competition to hurt the comapny the most.
The competition was taking advantage of a company policy which required that when a board was not good enough to sell as finished product it was thrown into a giant shredder and turned to mulch. So the goal was to see which of the two shifts could destroy the most lumber right under the noses of the new bosses without them realizing the damage that was being done. This was their passive aggressive way of punishing the company.
The company after becoming aware of the competition replaced the management team and reconsidered some of the benefit changes and things began to return to normal. Now you may be wondering why they replaced the management team instead of firing employees?
Well for one reason that is the kind of enviornment that creates union contracts, two how can you replace the whole staff of the business without losing the productivity that comes with experience? and three aren’t the managers to be held accountable for the results of their actions?
So after you have heard this story you should be observing your own production levels at your company and comparing them to previous years and asking yourself if maybe someone is feeding the Hog at your place? if so I recommend doing something about it before someone holds you accountable for it. Remember “IF NO ONE IS FOLLOWING THEN NO ONE IS LEADING!”