I'm tired of talking about me. Since we all know there are no changes, lets change the subject.
Today is the first working day of the month of March. For me, being a production supervisor, I take things month by month. I look at my production crews work load, make sure it's level and that I'm staffed adequately. I also make sure that they have everything they need from our other departments and our vendors to insure that everything will go out on time. Our goal is to have 100% on time delivery every month. Now this sounds like it should be easy enough to achieve, but believe me, in the 3 years that I've been with this company, I've only achieved 100% on time once. And that was for January of 2009. It was such an accomplishment that the company bought pizza for the entire shop. They even upped the ante and said that if we could do it again we'd earn pizza and wings! Needless to say, that was enough motivation for my crew to do everything possible to ensure we did it again.
Thursday February 26th comes around. It's our last production day of the month. So far at this point, we are still 100% on time. All of my crews informed me that everything was good for that day, so I went with that. I head off to my daily 9am meeting to brag that we will be receiving our pizza and wings because there is nothing that will be holding us back from our second consecutive month of perfection. WOOhooo!!!
By 2pm, my mood had changed. I found an order from a customer that was never confirmed by our customer service department and therefor never put into production. This was going to kill us. On the last day, in the last minute, we were shot down. Unable to produce the missing order in time, we were going to go from 100% to 99.5 for the month and lose out on our pizza and wings. The crew was heartbroken. They'd worked so hard to make it happen and were all so disappointed. I felt terrible ( though proud that these people were actually able to work as a team). We didn't make it, we'll just have to try again harder next month. Or so I thought.
The General manager had other ideas. He informed me today that he was still going to buy pizza for our effort. This left me in bit of a quandary. All of the employees wanted pizza yet we didn't achieve our goal, and we were being rewarded anyway. This just wasn't going to work. I told the GM that I wasn't going to accept his pizza. I don't want pity pizza. I want to be rewared for accomplishing what we set out to do. When we meet our objectives, we'll accept the reward. The GM of course tried to push for the pizza which I just couldn't accept. Needless to say, I'm not the most popular guy in the shop today. And of course all of my employees know that I turned down they're pizza. Hopefully I can teach them that it's more important to have morals, than pizza.
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4 comments:
Hmmm. I agree with your ethics here and applaud your leadership. However, if it was a customer service mistake that was out of the reach and knowledge of your crew and they reached the production goals that had been set out for them, they should get pizza. Going sans wings is painful enough.
I'd be mad at you too! But, you stick to your guns honey! Maybe you could've let them have dessert? It's a compromise....
on one hand i say good for you but then on the other hand i agree with weaselMomma too.
too bad customer service couldn't just be left out since it was their screw up and let everybody else eat pizza.
Unfortunately all of our departments have to work together as a team. I can't say that since one department did great and the other did not, that one can have pizza and the other can't. It will help the other departments to watch out for each other next time so that one doesn't screw up.
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