Job Shadowing

Last week, I spent almost the entire day working with one of our employees here.

The purpose of this job shadowing day was to understand his workload and identify opportunities to make his efforts more effective. I quickly found out that the reason we were not necessarily seeing things the same way is that our expectations were different.

I was expecting him to make decisions, try new things, identify problems.

He was afraid to say anything. He was afraid to question his data. He was afraid to trust his own observations. For example, at some point in the past, he was told to run the drawing solution concentration between 5.5 and 6.1%. He was not allowed to ever run outside of these values.

However, the operators have been having wire breaks. I am not used to running concentrations that low and inquired with some subject matter experts. Even the supplier of the product did not recommend running with the concentration that low.

Come to find out even, the person I job shadowed had questioned the concentration.

He just didn't say anything.

So we increased the concentration by a percent and the wire breaks went away.

Today, I witnessed something awesome.

This guy was putting up temperature guidelines on the necessary meters to monitor solution temperatures.

The best part, though, was that after he put them up, I saw him taking operators around and explaining how to manage the temperatures.

This transformation started exactly one week ago.