Improving Maintenance and Reliability Through Cultural Change. Stephen Thomas G.
and responsible for successful outcomes.
4.1 An Introduction to Organizational Values
Imagine that you are a foreman in a plant that manufactures a high-demand product. Your company works seven days per week, around-the-clock, to get the product out the door. Recently the plant’s management has instituted a reliability program that has taken many of the mechanics who had been performing day-to-day maintenance away from this work. The program refocused them on preventive and predictive tasks. Also assume that this initiative was in response to poor plant performance reflected by high down time and lost production.
To make this scenario complete, imagine that you are a senior foreman, highly respected by your maintenance peers and production, to whom you provide service. The reason you are held in high regard is that over the years you and your crews have always been available to fix the “emergency of the day” and save the operation. Production has known it can always count on your team to react to its needs, pulling out all stops to get the job done.
But with the new reliability program now in place, you can’t always be counted on as before. Several of your best “rapid responders,” who happen to be the best mechanics, are off performing preventive and predictive maintenance tasks. Their absence has reduced both your crew size and your ability to respond to your customers’ needs. The new program, which you never supported in the first place, has taken away valuable resources. Needless to say, you are frustrated, as are those in production who do not believe they will continue to get the response they need to keep up with the equipment breakdowns.
Today you are faced with the same dilemma you have repeatedly faced recently. A major piece of equipment has failed and production is screaming. Your choices are either to stop one of the less important routine maintenance jobs or to stop the preventive maintenance crew and divert them to the emergency. If you stop the routine job, one of your customers will be upset with your performance. These are the same people who praise you when you rush in and save the day. What do you do? - The choice is yours.
If you divert the preventive maintenance crew, as you have in the past, there will not be any repercussions because operation’s main concern has always been with the daily production quota. They will be happy and, as a result, so too will your boss. Therefore, the answer is obvious. As has occurred numerous times in our own work environment, you divert the preventive maintenance crew, promising yourself that you will reschedule them to these tasks at the earliest possible convenience.
What you have just witnessed is one of the key aspects that define an organization’s culture - organizational values. These values set the direction for the company and help people make decisions when faced with critical choices. In this example, the firm’s values were to fix what breaks as quickly as possible to support plant production. The crews performing other routine tasks could have been diverted, but this would have violated the basic values held by those in the plant. Conversely, preventive maintenance can always be done at another time; no one has ever raised any objection when the preventive maintenance crews were diverted in the past. In fact, everyone is so wrapped up in the day to day, that you face a continual fight getting people assigned to preventive maintenance each week. The most visible evidence of the stated value of preferring a rapid response to emergencies over staying on track with the PM program occurs when senior management, those who created the preventive maintenance program, accept this behavior when it is brought to their attention.
Organizational values dictate how we behave on a day-to-day basis. Of even more importance, they dictate our behavior when we are faced with critical and, often time, sensitive business choices.
Suppose that the plant in this example placed high value on its preventive maintenance program. Suppose too that you were virtually forbidden to divert the preventive maintenance crews without senior management’s approval, which was never given. What would your choice have been then for handling the emergency? The answer would have been to divert a crew from a less important routine task. Not only would this have resolved the problem, but production would understand that this choice had been made because the expressed organizational values emphasized the importance of preventive maintenance.
Examples of this type play out every day in our businesses because organizational values help us decide what is important to the business and how to behave. They are one of the key components of our study about organizational culture.
In this chapter we will explore the topic of organizational values in detail. This is an important concept because, as in our example, values dictate the thinking and decision making process of those in the company.
4.2 What Are Organizational Values?
What are your organization’s values? Thinking about and identifying them may not be as easy as you think; the true values of a firm are not always written down. Instead, they reflect how the members of the firm collectively behave, how they conduct their business, and what they believe are the true measures of success. Nevertheless, take a few minutes and jot down what you believe are your firm’s values. Next, have several members of your organization across multiple departments and at various organizational levels conduct the same exercise. If all of you reach the same set of answers, you most likely will have identified the organizational values of your company. It is my opinion that, except in rare circumstances, a single list will not be the outcome of this exercise. We will learn more about why this mismatch occurs throughout the balance of this chapter.
Our goal is to address the following questions:
•What are organizational values?
•What are their characteristics?
•How can we go about altering them if needed?
•How can we instill a new or modified set of values within the company?
Organizational values for our discussion can be defined as:
A company’s basic, collectively understood, universally applied and wholly accepted set of beliefs about how to behave within the context of the business. They also describe what achieving success feels like. These values are internalized by everyone in the company and therefore are the standard for excepted behavior.
Think for a minute. Would you go out and buy a gun and then rob a store? (The answer should be no!) Ask yourself why you feel this way and you will discover that it violates a core value that you have been taught. It is an act against what you believe, what your family believes, and what is viewed as unacceptable behavior in our society. In other words it is a value that is collectively held by society.
Similarly, organizational values are similarly applied in a business setting. When faced with a problem, those within the organization will invariably make a decision that reflects the organizational values of that business. These decisions are often not made consciously because organizational values are internalized and taken for granted. When you make a decision supported by the values, you feel comfortable. When you don’t, you sense that something is just not right with your world.
Take safety as an example. In many plants, safety is among the strongest organizational values. Numerous slogans, programs, promotions, rules, and regulations have been set up to govern our behavior. But all of these different efforts are in place only to reinforce the already existing organizational value that it is not acceptable behavior to allow someone to work unsafely.
Years ago I was a project manager on an operating unit that was shutdown for repair. We had a serious work delay associated with unloading catalyst from a multiple bed reactor. The project was behind schedule and the company was losing a great deal of money every day that the unit was off-line. At one point I was by the vessel opening talking with the contractor’s employees. When I asked