Down with the Sickness

     For the first time in over a year I have found myself being fairly sick this week. In reality I believe that I am probably a little bit sick and probably fairly stressed out. This has affected me both physically and mentally. Another first for me this week, or at least in a long time, was missing a class. I also managed to miss everything on Saturday. Tai Chi, fitness class and open training. I thought for sure that everything was good Saturday; I woke up early, did some push ups and sit ups, had breakfast, did some more sit ups and push ups and then laid down for a few minutes just after 9:00 am. When I finally woke up it was 1:30 pm. 

     For the past year or so, I have been working on a few different implementation projects as well as trying to deal with regular day to day stuff. I have been fortunate in the fact that some Supervisors have been able to step up and take some of the work load off. This past week we finally managed to review financials from the past two months and it has become fairly apparent that the lack of focus on the day to day has been pretty costly. Increased cost of rework, increased warranty, over target climbing, all of the "bad" things happening at once. This is definitely not the norm for me. Over the past couple of years while a lot of companies within Alberta have been crippled with the economic down turn, we have been able to make some amazing things happen. Even having to reduce staff initially in 2014, we have been able to keep almost everyone since. Revenue per hour has increased about 30% so even with 45% less staff than three years ago we are able to do almost the same amount of revenue. In order for this to happen there were some pretty large culture changes that needed to take place. Most people are eager to change, especially if there is instant gratification or immediate signs of improvement. The issue comes when they see that there is a lack of engagement from the people or person driving the change. This usually results in people reverting back to old habits. 

     Mid week there seemed to be a light at the end of the tunnel - no, it was not a freight train. We had an extremely time sensitive job, that of course the material was two days late for, hit the floor on Tuesday. When I got to work on Wednesday I went straight out to see that the night shift had not even started it. Me: freaking out. After some less than happy words with the supervisor I headed back to my office to prepare for another few hours of brow beating for the February financials. At the end of the day I was amazed at the progress that was made on this "rush" job. By end of day Thursday they were passed where we had thought they would be and the supervisor was actually in a good mood when he came to see me; this usually means that things are going quite well. On Friday afternoon I started reviewing March and realised that we were not only still on track to complete our revenue numbers for the month but we were actually 5% over for gross profit so far for the month. 

     Looking back, I realise that over the last few months I have let stress build up so much that it has been very visible to the employees. This in turn creates a great deal of stress for them believing that if things are bad enough for me to be this way that they better start worrying too. I can't change the way the current economy is, but I do plan on trying to keep the staff better informed of what is going on in the future. 

     The first step for me will be more interaction with people on the floor.