General Motors

Co-workers are great; an amazing amount of potential. With actual long-term goals in place, this would be an amazing place to work. Products themselves can be hit-or-miss, but are usually interesting.

At least in the manufacturing realm, the #1 motivator is fear. Anyone that can't be intimidated is eventually squeezed out to make for a compliant salaried workforce. Primary measurement in effect is Cost-per-unit, which is silly when you consider that the only lever that can be pulled at a plant level to adjust this is labor (hint: understaff on purpose and enforce 'casual' overtime). I've worked or Co-op'ed in several GM manufacturing plants, and this is the case in pretty much every one.

Rumor was, my current facility was dead-last of all manufacturing facilities in the Workplace-of-Choice survey in 2015. What floored me was that the 'interview' portion (which used an outside firm to gather anonymous feedback) was scheduled during a week where the plant was in shutdown: meaning that there weren't any employees around other than the select few that 'just so happened' to be in working overtime projects. To my knowledge, we have not been given the opportunity to do another plant-specific survey since.

Arbitrary measurements: goal plans and glide-paths generally don't reflect real business conditions. Most of the Level 1/2/3 production measurements are set up on a weekly/monthly cycle which greatly rewards short-term decision making. This is especially frustrating for a maintenance expenditure: there's absolutely no way to amortize a large maintenance cost (i.e., a $30,000 motor) on a monthly budget.

Case in point: A machine was failing, replacement part cost was $15,000, but because the plant would have been 'red' for the monthly maintenance budget, instead of planning the replacement and purchasing the components, it was band-aided and continued to run. When it eventually failed the next month, the damage caused an additional $20,000 of collateral damage, and incurred several shifts of downtime until it could be repaired. There was no effort to acknowledge that the additional cost was due to a failure to act, because by the measurements it was a better outcome.

Systems that are put in place for standardization never seem to be evaluated for efficacy in a closed-loop manner: the end result is a lot of motion that creates the illusion of work. Sad part is, every time there's a 'critical failure' we manage to add yet another required system on top of the 8 that were already there.

Why this appears to work: the fear of having to go through another GMS/5-Why/Fishbone/RedX/Root Cause Analysis/Problem Solving Tool/Diagonal Slice/TPM/Six-Sigma/OpEX exercise causes employees to either avoid doing anything involving risk, or to hide the mistake and hope no-one finds out (I must point out that Bob Lutz acknowledges and nails this fact very, very hard in one of his recent books).

I've seen enormous changes in the way corporate organizations (i.e., engineering, sales, marketing) are handling operations. Colleagues in Warren and Milford tell me that the workplace is drastically better now than they can remember. The 2020 events, the corporate leadership, and all of the top-end happenings are unrecognizable from the GM of 10 years ago.

What I don't see, though, is that attitude and those expectations getting to the manufacturing facilities, at all. But then again, there seems to be a branding crisis where GM wants to be seen as a "tech" company rather than a manufacturer (100% serious: even HR and corporate recruiters are explicitly told not to refer to GM as a manufacturer anymore, but as a tech company "like Apple or Facebook"). If GM is giving up on being a manufacturer, fantastic. Otherwise, get serious about pushing the 'culture change' to the plants.