Productivity, quality, profitability: everything suffers from a lack of collaboration in this company.
It may be my subjective impression, but never, over a long series of years, has collaboration between employees been worse. I don’t know why there is no more effective collaboration here anymore, but I think that should be one of the priorities that those at the top should think about.
4 replies (most recent on top)
Egos!
I/we have given multiple ideas that would save time and money, we get dismissed. If you go up one level, we get dismissed, if you go up another level you get dismissed. The culture here is totally shot. Most people including myself now just come in for a check. They pay us to pay (for what we do compared to other companies) and then act like we are stupid or don’t know what we’re talking about. It’s the culture. Now we are being pushed to make more product, faster with less quality issues. Lol, I guess they never heard the old saying you can’t have it fast and good. Like I said, the people running the company at almost all levels of management shouldn’t even be in charge of a fast food restaurant let alone one of the largest commercial and military aerospace manufacturing companies. The only thing that could turn all this around (at least at my building) is a total reset. You’d have to let go of 80-90% of the workforce and start fresh. Then you can really reset the culture.
I have a engineering degree and your impression is correct, and Covid has made the divide between management and the shop floor much worse.
You are lucky when you walk down a hall there are still people there and they aren't all couch surfing at their lake house. My advice would be to learn your product, learn your customers, learn your job and all adjacent jobs and come up with ways these job can be done more efficiently. Good engineers can tell the difference between people who care and those who are just phoning it in. Engineers that don't acknowledge people's greeting and don't listen to new ideas (even if only to explain why they won't work) aren't good engineers.
Because people that have degrees think less of/look down on people like myself that are blue collar and do the actual work. When I walk down the hallway in the morning and say hello to people they act like they don’t hear you and you’re a ghost. In order to have collaborative discussion you have to have respect for the person you’re talking to or at least respect the knowledge said person has. That has went away.