THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 12, 1995 TAG: 9509120247
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT
TODAY: The push toward total quality management leaves many wondering
how they can tackle both their traditional jobs and their new duties.
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 136 lines
The total quality management movement has the American worker feeling like a fledgling shoved out of its nest. Thirty feet in the air. Not knowing how to fly. Wings flapping like mad and hoping that something will happen to keep him from crashing.
Workers are willing to give TQM a try. Frankly, as is the case with the bird, there's not much choice. Trying it is a whole lot better than the alternative.
The push toward this new way of working has left many with the same kinds of anxieties they had the first day on the job: What do they expect of me? What's this company trying to accomplish? Can I do this?
``Brutality,'' Chere Simons calls it. And she ought to know.
Simons, a consultant for Priority Management in Norfolk, runs TQM survival courses for local workers who are frazzled by all their ``new'' duties associated with TQM. Simons was thrust into her consulting career in the late 1980s when a Mobil Corp. downsizing left her jobless.
It's not the goals of TQM that workers view as difficult. Teamwork, empowerment, customer satisfaction and quality control all make sense. The trouble comes from the ways many companiesseek to apply those principles.
Simply put: TQM often translates to more responsibility for the rank and file. That means more work and more accountability, sometimes with little direction from above.
But nobody's adding hours to the day. Nobody's saying, ignore your old job. They're saying, keep doing your job, and do this - for the same pay.
Nancy Rantanen knows the feeling. The Navy surveillance center manager is often at her desk by 6 a.m., trying to get her regular job done before she gets caught up in TQM meetings.
``All the responsibility going down to the employee's level, that's great,'' she says. ``But the employees are getting burned out.
``You hear people taking mental health days for sick days to relieve stress. I never understood that. I do now.''
Collaborative work, as called for in TQM, requires meetings, often lots of them. Not just for managers but also for ground-level workers.
Simons tells the members of her TQM survival courses that the average manager now spends 17 hours a week in meetings. That adds up to 21 weeks of meetings a year.
``It seems like job enlargement,'' says Jesse Dickens, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard Finance Center in Chesapeake. ``It's a whole lot more tasks without really going anywhere initially.
``One thing I have to keep clear is that any type of quality meetings you have is real work, it's not additional work,'' Dickens adds. ``A lot of people have problems with this; they think it's an addition. It's not bigger or smaller. It's just different.''
Workers' reactions to TQM often hinge on their position, profession, personality and ambition. They seem to fall into three categories: those who understand the new system and embrace it; those who either don't understand what's now expected of them or can't pull it off; and the ``change survivors'' who have seen dozens of new management theories come and go and just hope to ride this one out.
Many workers see salvation from a dead-end job in the system. Their suggestions for improvement that had gone ignored for years have finally found a venue in these new programs. When their ideas are actually put to use, they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for the company's future.
Bill Athayde, vice president of Industrial Marine Service in Norfolk, says a receptionist's idea to change the bookkeeping system meant bills began going out after three days instead of three weeks.
``The client gets billed more timely,'' he says. ``We get paid sooner. It doesn't get old in the client's eyes. It's increased the collectibility of our bills.''
Dozens of other success stories can be found in Hampton Roads. On the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, under construction at Newport News Shipbuilding, TQM is credited for a less measurable success.
``So far it's meant that people have to be nice to you,'' a Stennis crew member said, ``but in the Navy, that's a pretty big deal.''
The Navy's efforts to change not just the way it operates, but how its sailors deal with each other are typical of TQM. TQM's founder, W. Edwards Deming, sought a change for society, not just for jobs. People in quality-oriented companies are supposed to refer to co-workers not just as colleagues but as ``internal customers.''
Businesses could give a society stability, Deming argued. They have to be about more than making a profit.
When TQM fails, the blame often lies at the feet of the presidents, senior managers and executives who brought in the new system.
``Too often the initial focus and effort is to bring everybody together, give them a flag and stick a button with a slogan on their shirt,'' says Victor Rios, the director of quality assurance at nView Corp., based in Newport News. ``Then management goes, `Whew, I'm glad that's over with - that was a lot of work,' and the workers are left to carry out the program.''
Slogans and catch phrases make up the public face of TQM at many companies, even though Deming lectured that companies should ``eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the work force. . .''
Deming also recognized management as the most likely source for failure of his program. Many companies bring in one variation of TQM, drop it after a year when it doesn't show results, then change direction with a different program. Deming said these ``false starts'' damage workers' faith in trying new systems.
Considering all the ``underuse, abuse and misuse of the people of this country,'' Deming liked to say, the United States is ``number one for underdevelopment'' of its work force.
He's not the only one.
``Management has a history of adding on programs to an already full plate,'' wrote William W. Scherkenbach, a Deming disciple and former director of statistical methods at Ford Motor Co. ``They must decide what has to go in order to make room for new systems.''
In fairness, Deming's system is as big a change for managers as it is for their employees. Handing the company keys over to a bunch of underlings isn't easy for a hands-on supervisor.
Frederick Denny, an engineer at the Norfolk Naval Aviation Depot, was asked to report on impediments to workflow at the warplane repair facility. His team spent four months investigating and talking to production workers. Employees on the flight line said TQM was working well on their level, but that management kept interfering.
``You can't teach a micromanaging group of managers some vastly new management style and expect them to go along with it,'' Denny says. ``But it's hard to go along with it, especially when everything's already structured.''
Empowering workers, at least as it was espoused by Deming, is often misconstrued. It doesn't ask managers to turn their companies over to subordinates. It asks workers, middle managers and executives to work together.
In this rather hasty transition, that leaves the managers out there in midair, flapping their wings just as crazily as their underlings. MEMO: ON PILOT ONLINE: Previous stories in this series, plus links to TQM
resources on the Internet, are available on the News page of Pilot
Online. See page A2.
ILLUSTRATION: Dilbert Cartoon
W. Edwards Deming
KEYWORDS: CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT by CNB