In my opinion; employee involvement is a very powerful tool.  I started
being involved with the concept in the 80's when I was a plant manager of a
printed circuit fabrication operation and consultant named Bill Van Horn
helped us initiate it in the form of Quality Circles.
The bottom line is nobody knows their job better than the operator and
nobody can reduce variation or improve the process better than they can.
Both the employer and the operator benefit because it shows each the value
of the person and teamwork; and it exposes tribal knowledge which in many
cases is how the work is actually performed not how some engineer wrote the
procedure.  And before everyone jumps on that, yes I am an engineer and
before I got involved I wrote some of the best methods I though ever
existed.  It is a humbling thing to realize that no matter what you wrote;
the operator really does know how to do their job better than you the
engineer or you the manager.
In the 90's I supported another operation that used employee involvement and
the value of teaming and operator involvement helped us improve consistency
and raise the yields on some pretty challenging boards with four active
planes of Copper Invar Copper in them. I think what works best is an
approached where teaming, training, and chartering  is done in a group
setting involving operator, support personnel, and management together where
each person gets to see the tasks from the others perspective.
Once you buy in to the concept you get to the key words, document what you
do and do what you document, and both the company and the employee benefit.

Opinion Submitted by Ted Edwards
--- Original Message -----
From: "Kathy Kuhlow" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 9:29 AM
Subject: [TN] NTC this is a question regarding employee involvment


If you have no opinion or want to get in a discussion regarding this topic
please delete this message....

I publish a company newsletter each month.  Each month I try to add an
article in this paper regarding principles.  Most of the principles are
written to help inspire Leadership, commitment, etc.  The goal of the
article is to help educate fellow employees and hopefully get some of them
involved.  I firmly feel that a involved, caring work force produces more,
faster, and correctly.

This month's topic is Employee involvement.  Do or have any of you been
involved with any programs within this topic range?  Any opinions on what
are the better methods or results of involvement?  Let me know.  I hope to
publish the paper for the month soon and would like to explore possible
actual programs like this.

A couple of weeks a go a forum was suggested for Managers, well here I am.
You know one of those upper managers who enjoys being in technet  to learn
and share if possible.  I really hope you will let me know your opinion.

Kathy

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