You want to keep Ensley as your employee because you don’t want another job opening to fill, but now you know he is killing your department’s productivity. What do you do?
For management class,
You are a new supervisor of a department of 20 assembler-shippers, whose job is to:
- Arrive to work on time for every scheduled shift
- Review customer orders
- Expedite and check materials arriving from other departments
- Assemble materials in a defined order:
- Installation manual
- Schematic diagram
- Warranty information
- Plastic screens
- Parts envelope
- Wires and caps
- Package all materials in order and ship to customer
- Maintain productivity; personally ship at least 50 packages per shift
Your department has more than its fair share of employee absenteeism. When employees call off from work, it is very difficult to catch up on what needs to be done over the course of a shift. Compounding this problem is that your department has job openings for three assembler-shippers and you’re planning to start interviewing applicants for the positions next week.
However, you do have some very reliable employees. One of them is Ensley, who is at work on time every day and rarely takes time off.
You also have a “customer returns” issue. Packages are returned to your area nearly every day by postal service or private carrier, sent back by customers for a variety of reasons. As part of your supervisory duties, you begin to analyze the source of the problem.
In doing so, you discover that the packages Ensley sends out are returned by customers 30% of the time, a far higher return rate than attributed to other employees.
In addition, you find that customers called for new packages five times last month, after having received an initial package. Digging a little further, you discover that Ensley was responsible for all five calls for new packages. So, you start phoning customers who have either returned packages sent out by Ensley, or have called for a new package.
These customer calls are very revealing -- Ensley’s packages sometimes are missing materials, or materials are assembled out of order. When this happens, some customers mistakenly think that materials are not in the package, so they throw it out and call for a new one to be sent out. (Which, you find out, your department cheerfully does -- no questions asked.) However, you realize that this practice of replacing materials that customers actually already were sent is very expensive for the company to keep doing.
“So that’s why my department can’t ever seem to make budget,” you think.
The employees in your department like Ensley but you’ve observed them shaking their heads when talking about him, though they do optimistically point out, “He’s always here.”
You want to keep Ensley as your employee because you don’t want another job opening to fill, but now you know he is killing your department’s productivity. What do you do?
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