Measurement
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How Do You Reduce Workers’ Idle Time?
- January 17, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
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I read recently that workers’ idle time is costing the U.S. economy over $100 billion per year. And there’s no one reason it’s happening — employees may goof off, they may take longer on breaks and lunch, a machine may break down, their managers may inefficiently assign work, or it just may be the nature
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How Much is Worker Idle Time Costing You?
- January 10, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
I recently read in the Wall Street Journal that workers’ idle time — the time workers spend not being productive — is costing U.S. employers $100 billion per year. (This doesn’t include needless meetings, which I’d guess are costing another $100 billion, but that’s just me.) Some examples of idle time can include chatting around
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Make Smart Layoffs With Objective Measurement
- December 27, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Measurement
While I never had to make any layoffs in my career, I’ve seen them happen, and often without any real plan to help the company further. I can say that while I’ve never done a layoff in my own career, I have reduced the workforce to help it run at peak efficiency, like firing third
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Leaders Can Lead More People Through Measurement
- December 20, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Measurement
I sometimes think we have too many middle managers clogging up the business world. I look at companies that do big layoffs of their middle managers and wonder if they were actually that effective to begin with. If a company decides they can do away with 20 percent of their workforce, and the managers are
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How Do You Keep Up Company Morale?
- October 18, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management, Measurement
Company morale can have more dramatic rises and falls than a roller coaster. You’ll have your seasonal ebbs and flows, highs before a big product launch, lows after a major crisis or periods of poor performance, as well as the occasional holiday-related highs. But you can also have pockets of high and low morale throughout
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Performance Evaluations Waste Time and Money
- October 11, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
Annual performance evaluations are generally useless. I actually did away with them because I found people would generally work extra hard two weeks before the evaluation, and counted on management not to remember all the things they screwed up along the way. But if you have an effective daily, weekly, and monthly measurement system, you
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How Do You Determine the Value of an Employee?
- October 4, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
Many people don’t realize, but the left guard on an NFL team is often the second-highest paid player on the team, right after the quarterback. That’s because that player guards the back of a right-handed quarterback, his “blind” side. After Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann had his femur snapped by Lawrence Taylor during a 1985
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The Importance of Measuring ROI in Manufacturing
- July 5, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Measurement
For the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about important leadership qualities, and how being persistent and decisive was key in automating one of our oldest, dirtiest, and most hazardous manufacturing processes. (We were hand galvanizing certain pipes, and the galvanization chemical contained arsenic!) So we tore out all the hand-operated process and built up
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How to Be Perfect: Improve and Change Often
- May 10, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Measurement
To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to change often. I’ve always been a big fan of Winston Churchill, and as I was growing up, I adopted several of his quotes as philosophies to live by. This month, I’ll discuss four quotes that have guided me over my professional career. I’m a
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Use Plant Workflow Measurement to Manage EPA Requirements and Reporting
- February 22, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Measurement, Safety
In a previous article, I talked about the importance of plant workflow measurement to determine a plant’s productivity, such as a machine’s downtime or an associate’s total productivity. With a plant workflow system, associates can self-manage their own performance, and you can be alerted early to potential problems with machines, before a breakdown ever occurs.