human resources

  • How Managers Can Keep Unions on Their Side

    • September 1, 2024
    • Posted by: Nanette Gregory
    • Category: Business, Leadership, Manufacturing
    No Comments
    David Marshall How Managers Can Keep Unions on Their Side

    I had a rule as a manager that I would never take union leadership by surprise. If anything, despite the traditional “management versus the union” conflict, I always believed they were an important part of my team. For example, if I was ever thinking of initiating a new process or major idea, I would share

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  • How to Handle Firing Someone: A Practical Approach

    • September 20, 2023
    • Posted by: Nanette Gregory
    • Category: Business, Leadership, Management, Manufacturing
    No Comments
    Firing employees
    Firing someone can be a challenging and emotional task for any employer or manager. You often have empathy for the other person, you're worried about their future and their family, and some small part of you (hopefully) is concerned about their well-being. But as the leader, it's your job to protect the company. You have
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  • How Did We Handle Racism at Robroy

    • June 3, 2020
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Leadership, Management
    No Comments
    Anti-racism sign held up by a protestor. The sign says "Racism is not patriotism."

    We never had to deal with too much racism during my time at Robroy, mostly because I made sure people knew that wasn’t allowed. One day, we had an incident where someone had scribbled someone’s name on a bathroom door, and calling them a racial slur. I certainly wasn’t going to stand for that or

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  • How Do You Decide to Allocate Resources and Staffing? (Hint: Measurement)

    • February 12, 2020
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Management, Measurement
    No Comments
    An old picture of a factory from the 1950s. To allocate resources properly, you should be measuring everything first.

    There are times where you have to allocate — or reallocate, as the case may be — your money, staff, and resources to solve a particular problem. Maybe you have to do a crash inventory where everyone has to stop what they’re doing and everyone has to focus on counting everything in the warehouse. Or

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  • Improving Productivity Reduces a Factory’s HR, Onboarding Costs

    • August 14, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Management, Productivity
    No Comments
    Improving productivity on your factory floor can also reduce HR and onboarding costs.

    Improving productivity throughout your operation, especially on the manufacturing floor, can have an amazing ripple effect throughout your entire organization. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we were able to improve productivity by measuring our results on the floor and in our accounts receivable department. We were able to save a lot of

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  • Managers, not HR, Should Spend Time Doing Talent Recruiting

    • November 28, 2018
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Management
    No Comments
    A young man on a job interview with a mature woman. It's the hiring managers who should focus on talent recruiting, not HR.

    When it comes to finding new talent, the onus shouldn’t be on Human Resources to do all the work. HR can find potential talent by ticking off all the boxes, but it’s ultimately the manager who should be responsible for testing the individual skill sets and determining whether they would be a cultural and talent

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  • The Time There Was Nearly a Knife Fight on My Factory Floor

    • November 7, 2018
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Leadership, Management, Safety
    No Comments
    Safety signs from a steel factory.

    You run into all kinds of problems when you’re managing a factory and running a business. I’ve had to fire people for sleeping on the job. I locked my own son out of a meeting for being late. And I once had to talk a naked guy down out of the rafters. So it shouldn’t

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  • How Can a Department Like HR Measure Itself?

    • July 25, 2018
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Management, Measurement
    No Comments
    You can measure the back office staff, like HR, on their performance too.

    Plenty of people understand how relatively easy it is for a manufacturing operation to perform objective measurements on its output. Each machine is capable of performing X number of actions per hour, and each associate is also capable of producing X number of units in that hour. You can measure units produced, downtime, and even

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  • How to Deal With a Naked Guy in Your Rafters

    • March 22, 2017
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Management
    No Comments

    I saw a lot of things in my days as president and COO of Robroy Industries. But never in my 21 years did I expect to see a naked man in the rafters. It seems the man, we’ll call him Randy, had been doing the same job every day for 25 years. He was an

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  • Hiring Good People Sometimes Means Ignoring HR

    • January 11, 2017
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Management
    No Comments
    Hiring good people sometimes means ignoring the HR requirements

    Hiring good people is becoming more and more of an issue for companies as the unemployment rate drops. And it’s becoming more difficult as recruiting services and hiring software have entered into the mix, because the résumés being submitted can be fairly unreliable. Recruiters have a tendency to coach candidates on how to puff up

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