The Story of the 4th Shift
Does your company have a “special shift” that does off-hour work for you? People that come in maybe on the “4th Shift” over the weekend? They spend a couple of shifts doing the maintenance and projects that can’t be done during operational hours?
A lot of companies do and they can do some great things for you, improve efficiency, eliminate down time and help you maximize the time and talents of your critical and experienced operators. Or… they can shut you down, cost you thousands in materials and repairs and make your most talented people do things that do not maximize their skills.
Every company that has the “4th shift”, although in your shop it could be a 2nd or 3rd shift, maintains a love / hate relationship. When things go well you feel it in the shop and see it on the bottom line. When things go wrong you feel it as well but in the opposite direction. And if it goes really badly you feel it like a punch in the stomach.
The “4th shift” is the most unforgiving of jobs in any shop. Like an offensive line in football… When they do their job you never mention them but when things go wrong your quarterback (that’d be you) gets killed. So what do we do? Get bigger shoulder pads? Do our maintenance during critical production hours so we can have supervision and skilled people on hand? Neither one of those will fix the problem… There has to be a better way.
Here are suggestions in my 10 Rules for the “4th shift” Workers and their Managers
For the Shift Workers:
Safety 1st – The late night/weekend shift may not have the same familiarity with the rules and dangers of the facility that the production shifts do. Be sure you are trained to handle, operate and treat the equipment, chemicals, and machinery needed. Make sure you understand interactions and potential hazardous situations that can result from mishandling.
Measure Twice – Cut / Mix / Pump / Adjust Once – When the line operator, production manager, safety officer is on hand there is always somebody to ask the right question and give the right advice. In the middle of the night or weekend that person is not on hand. You guys must be your own conscience and advisor. You need to be sure you’re doing the right things the right way.
Quality! Not Quantity – What you do you need to well. Really well. And doing it wrong or doing something that can’t be undone easily is worse than doing nothing. If you do it, be sure you’re doing it right.
Don’t do it! Better you don’t do it at all. Better we’re disappointed it wasn’t done then having to undo it or re-do it. And there may not be enough raw material or parts or whatever to do it over. Making up a tank wrong, putting the last replacement part in a machine wrong, removing something before being sure there even is a replacement part… All of these things can leave the day shift shut down as something was used improperly and now we can’t replace or repair the line.
Found Gold! How many times have we looked behind, under, in or on top of a machine, wall, ceiling panel, or in a tank and seen something valuable sitting there? Leaving equipment, materials, production pieces and other valuable tools or parts behind after doing the job is expensive! If there were $20 bills left behind, under, in or on top of something you can be sure it would be retrieved! Do the same with the tools and materials used so we can find them during the day.
For the Managers:
Training is Not a Checked Box – You better be teaching, coaching and training these night owls. It’s very important that you’ve prepared your crew and the supervisors for their jobs. How you train for 1st shift, the shift that has the safety net, may not be sufficient for the “4th Shift”. There is no safety net at 2AM or on Sunday morning. The safety net is home asleep and can’t help avert a disaster. The only thing you can do is train it, mistake proof it, and train it again.
Preparation is key! Beyond training the employees, have you prepared the shop, equipment, supplies or products needed so that there are no questions and nothing they’ll need and not have? Before that line gets broken down, the tank pumped or those “you can only use them once” parts get taken out, do you have what you need? You’re sure right? You had your GM/Facility Manager/Lead Operator line everything up and verify that you had what they’ll need right? Another quick question: Do you sleep with your phone? Do you sleep at all? Preparation means less stress and no surprises.
Have you been there? Okay now this may not be as extreme everywhere but I have a story.
We ran a 2nd shift and the results were spotty. The supervisor was a great guy, organized, knowledgeable and trustworthy. We did a good job preparing him and the shop at the end of every day, setting them up for success. But we got about 75-80% of the results we expected in terms of quantity and quality. So one night I showed up at 11:30 just to see what was going on. What I walked in to was a scene from the wild, wild west both inside and out. The workers were a rough bunch and as bars emptied out the streets were wild. The supervisor was doing a great job! An amazing job under the circumstances.
It was not pretty and frankly not what I would call safe. It was a miracle we got as much as we did from this shift. It may surprise you to find you may have something going on in your shop that you could never anticipate that may be impacting your results. It could be as simple as they don’t have access to any food or cold drinks. It could be there’s an office locked where the keys are kept and occasionally they can’t get supplies. It could be a timer that shuts off, a light they can’t turn on or the parking lot is dark and scary. Until you see it with your own eyes you may not understand just how hard things can be for them. Quite possibly, you may have a simple solution to something that’s dragging them and their results down. So set your alarm, clear your calendar for a few hours the next morning and drop on in…
Never Assume – There’s an old joke/adage/comedy routine about never assuming and I'm sure you've seen it. If you ever… EVER… hear yourself saying “I assumed they knew”, “I assumed they had what they needed”, “I assumed they wouldn’t do something so dumb” then congratulations… You can grab your own white board and have a little fun because you absolutely made and ASS out of U and ME. Which leads me to…
When the people that work for us fail, we need to blame ourselves – Yes it’s true our people let us down. Things happen that could have been avoided. Mistakes are made. The simplest things go wrong but… If we’re doing our jobs we can minimize the mistakes and avert the disasters. And when it does go wrong, so wrong that a change needs to be made, we need to ask ourselves why? And what could we have done to make that employee successful.
This may be an oversimplification of a complex problem but the “4th shift” can be a tremendous asset or a tremendous pain. I knew a company where the standing joke was the 1st shift spent all day fixing what the 2nd shift had done. Hardly what I would call a successful program. To that point, I believe that our jobs include participation, inspiration and anticipation. We need to know what our crew is dealing with, we need motivate them and make sure they want to do the best job they can, and we need to anticipate the issues and troubles they may encounter while you stare at your phone in the middle of the night hoping things are going well. You can buy the body but you need the employees to give you their minds. If you can do these three things you’ll greatly reduce the things that can go wrong. And maybe sleep a little easier…