Masonry Magazine December 1993 Page. 28
Quality Team Building
You must see your employees as people to work with you and not for you. And you must see yourself as the coach. Your job is not to play the game for your employees, but rather to train them, encourage them, and motivate them to do their jobs and score with your customers.
If you can make these changes if you can recognize these important areas of the Quality Process-then you have taken the most important step to Quality Team Building. Now let's look at why teams work so well. It's really very simple. The rationale is based on common sense and human nature.
Two Heads Are Better Than One
We pay our employees but we don't tap into the information they have about our customers and the operation of our business. In our Quality Institutes, we conduct a group exercise to demonstrate the power of the team. The exercise is called "Lost At Sea" and requires the participants to rank certain items that they would want if they were lost at sea. First, we ask each individual participant to rank the items in order of importance. Then, once the individual ranking is complete, we put the individuals in teams of 5 to 6 people and ask the teams to rank the items. Then we compare the results against the expert's ranking. Invariably, the team average is better than the average of the individuals. The teams pool their resources and achieve better results. It happens every time.
People Want To Be Involved
Human nature is such that people not only want to be involved-but the psychologists tell us that they have a need to be involved. You can meet with both their needs and their wants by getting your employees involved in the team concept.
The team approach works because it gets people involved. And these teams can be involved in all aspects of your business. Teams can be used to assist you in:
Planning and setting goals for your company:
Identifying problems and inefficiencies in your operation:
Determining the causes for those problems and inefficiencies;
Developing solutions for the problems;
Implementing the solutions; and
Measuring the results of the solutions.
The opportunity for teams is everywhere. Any time you have two or more people working on the same task, you have the opportunity for a team. From the masons and hod carriers laying the wall to the bookkeepers and clerks preparing your financial statements.
Help your employees see themselves as teams and the results will improve immediately. But these teams can't come together without you. You must learn how to become an effective team builder. The best way to do that is to develop the habits of an effective Quality Team Builder:
Be Goal Driven
Everyone in your organization, including your employees, must have a goal. You must take the leadership role in setting goals for your company, and making sure that the goals are communicated to everyone in your company. Once the company goals are set, make sure that everyone knows how their jobs relate to the company goals.
Non-Stop SCAFFOLDING
Increase Production 20%-35%
When the wall is waist high to the bricklayer, he will produce more. Government studies, the experience of our customers, and our own experience have proven that point most convincingly. Actually, it's basic human nature. When the bending, reaching, and stooping are eliminated, a mason will fall into a fast, comfortable side-to-side rhythm when laying brick and block. He'll put in more units and be less tired at the end of the day. How much more production depends on the type of work. Production increases of 20% are common, while 35% is typical for blank walls like warehouses. Our users have reported production increases as high as 47% on 12" blocks.
When you calculate the labor savings from this feature alone, you will see that Non-Stop can easily pay for itself in the first 10 to 20 weeks. Some masonry contractors say that their scaffolding paid for itself on the first job.
Never Run Scaffold-High Again
Building a wall from the ground to scaffold-high and then moving your men is another unnecessary expense to eliminate from your operation. It tends to scatter your men, creates extra work for the laborers, and it wastes ten to fifteen minutes of production time getting the crew started again.
Using Non-Stop, you will set your scaffolding in place first, before any work begins. Stock it with materials and your masons start the wall right off the scaffold. Once they have reached a comfortable working height, their walk-boards can be dropped in place in about 30 seconds and they continue working uninterrupted until the wall is topped out. Non-Stop gives you the ability to put your mason' walkboards as low as 4' off the ground.
Another standard feature Non-Stop provides is the ability to add an extra walkboard for the masons. In many situations, like brick veneer with block back-up, you must run the block up first. Using Non-Stop, you can run the block with 3 planks for the masons, let the scaffold down, and then run the brick with 2 planks without moving or replanting the scaffolding.
The Faste
28 MASONRY-NOVEMBER/DECEMBER, 1993