Excerpt from Chapter 18: Applying the ABCs – Dressed and Ready
During the pilots, we discovered an old - culture behavior that was costing the company a lot of productivity and affecting everyone by the cultural tone it set. When we rolled out the ABCs more broadly, it became the first issue to be tackled.
It’s a perfect example of how a little bit of time lost by everyone, every day, adds up to a great big cost. It could happen in any company. The difference was that CN fixed it.
Guess I’ll Have Another Coffee...
On a typical day, employees would show up at the 7:30 a.m. start time, grab coffee, change into their work clothes, and wait for their supervisor to hand out daily assignments.
When the supervisors arrived, they developed the daily assignments, and then waited until everyone was assembled before posting them.
Once assignments were posted, employees returned to their lockers to get the safety equipment needed for their work that day, maybe grab another coffee, and then finally head out to work.
Can you hear the time clocks ticking away for everyone through all of this? And productivity slipping down the drain?
This process took employees 25 to 45 minutes every morning. With a crew of 20 people, 8 to 15 hours were lost before the day’s work had even started! And that was just one crew, at one rail yard, on one day. This was happening in several rail yards every day. Do the math and it was adding up to big dollars in unproductive labor and lost opportunity.
Another Switchpoint
It was almost embarrassing to admit that CN had a problem like this. It was time to spike another switch. Leaders started a new set of behavior and results expectations, called Dressed & Ready. Supervisors were to prepare assignments before they left work the previous day, posting them so that, when employees walked in for their next shift, they saw immediately what equipment they would need. This change meant that employees were able to go to their lockers only once and get everything they needed for the work day.
Start time was changed from “on-site by 7:30 a.m.” to “in the common room, wearing appropriate equipment, and ready to go at 7:30 a.m.” In other words: be Dressed & Ready for work.
Sound easy? Of course not. Like all bad habits, the old ingrained behavior was difficult to alter. As an organization, there were decades of comfortable old routines in place that both employees and managers didn’t want to let go.
Put yourself in their position: You have a morning routine, driving to work over your normal route, listening to your favorite news or music, coffee at the same time, and so on. CN ’s employees had their morning routines. Supervisors were accustomed to the casual environment. They were afraid of the consequences for making waves.
The Science behind the Change
It’s interesting to look at the ABCs to see how we changed the behavior of employees so they were Dressed & Ready for work. Remember, before Dressed & Ready, it was like this:
- Antecedent: Everyone knew the start time was 7:30 a.m.
- Behavior: People arrived at work by 7:15 a.m. and then got ready for their jobs by 8:15 a.m.
- Consequences: Everyone had time to socialize and have another coffee before starting to work. (This positive consequence drove people to maintain their late start to work.)
Clearly, this behavior had to change. Implementing the new Dressed & Ready behaviors required changing the consequences to encourage the new behavior of being Dressed & Ready at start time, and to discourage the old behavior.
In tackling Dressed & Ready, we drew on our positive leaders and positive followers and strengthened their influence relative to the negative leaders and negative followers. These positive leaders and followers had always wanted to put in a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage. They didn’t like starting late. But as long as management seemed unconcerned about this lax behavior, why should they speak out? Experience told them that they would only be hassled by the negative leaders and followers — a negative consequence.
The solution was to create new antecedents and consequences to drive the behavior change from starting work late to beginning on time.
Excerpted from SwitchPoints: Culture Change on the Fast Track to Business Success, Copyright ©2008 by The Continuous Learning Group, Inc. (CLG) Published by John Wiley & Sons. Used with permission of the publisher.