The step from a traditional professional and remuneration scheme based on job descriptions to the introduction of a more flexible and dynamic model focused on the person and the development of their skills is described, within an industrial company, where physical and repetitive tasks they are the dominant ones.
In this article I want to rescue the idea of how some concepts used in the companies of the new economy can be applied, with their nuances, by traditional companies, in industrial sectors. Without forgetting to thank Doctor Sandalio Gómez López-Egea, for his contributions.
To locate ourselves we start from an industrial group, specialized in the manufacture of flat glass, mainly dedicated to the manufacture of double-glazed windows and safety glass. Although mature, this sector had evolved favorably thanks to its increasing use in construction, where traditional monolithic glass has been supplanted by materials with better safety and insulation performance.
The company had 8 work centers, with an average workforce of 40 workers, located mainly in Catalonia, Spain. Each work center supplied its reference area, having a significant market share and leading in some of them.
The company had modern machinery and infrastructure according to its productive capacity. The work procedures were standardized and responded to a hierarchical structure based on the operator's specialization on the job. Work processes were contrasted and effective.
The production process was mainly divided into three phases, which coincide with the production areas:
Glass
cutting Assembly and manufacturing
Shipment of the finished material.
People who joined in general did so without experience in the sector and through theoretical-practical training on the job, given by a more experienced colleague, under the supervision of the section chief, managed to acquire the necessary knowledge to develop his work. The idea behind this scheme is that the greater specialization in the tasks performed, the experience gained and associated with it, the necessary efficiency and productivity. It is a physical, mechanical work, which involves repetitive movements, where there is a direct interrelation between the sections, with any subsequent flaws or delays in the production process. Although each section requires a specific type of skills, many of them are shared, since the material covered is the same.There was a significant problem of staff turnover, which meant that the model was not consolidated definitively, since there were frequently staff in training, without guarantees of prolonged continuity.
The remuneration system was the one agreed in the sector agreement, based on the previously defined professional groups, and on the tasks assigned to each job. Functional mobility was an exceptional topic, since it was only applied in those cases where it was necessary to fill a position in another section due to absenteeism or when a vacancy occurred, it was proposed that it be filled by a specific person.
In 2005, some changes were made in the management of the group, separating one of the parent companies, to start their solo career and a business development project different from the current one, based on the creation of more business units. Agile, with less structure, equipped with the latest technology to specialize mainly in modern products, with greater added value, with a strong unmet demand, in terms of delivery times and service.
At this moment my incorporation as head of the human resources area occurs, having before me the opening of a work center and with it the opportunity to generate from the beginning a different professional scheme, according to the new culture and philosophy.
Also taking into account that we are in a very competitive and segmented market, where consolidated companies defend their position and try to copy any competitive advantage detected in another manufacturer. It was necessary to quickly gain market share and reach the expected billing levels to ensure the success of the project.
In the first place, we find the latest generation machinery to manufacture glass, cutting tables, polishing machines, numerical control machinery, etc., which initially required a different profile than the current one, since more senior personnel were needed. qualification or with the potential to acquire it, in addition to the need to retain them due to the significant cost of selecting and training the operators, which was previously carried out in one of the group's factories.
It was necessary to detect the main causes of staff turnover, based on previous experience, it was concluded that although a stable job was offered, it became routine and monotonous, due to the specialization of tasks that the previous scheme used, furthermore, no variable remuneration was contemplated that could distinguish and reward individual contributions, so that in an expanding labor market there were not many retention tools available.
The new work scheme required flexible staff, since as an added value to the product it was decided to go to market with an offer of delivery times 50% lower than the current average offered by competitors, which would place us as the company of faster service, condition highly valued by potential buyers. This placed us in a scheme where functional mobility was an indispensable premise if you wanted to overcome the possible bottlenecks that can occur in a section, without having to oversize the template.
Another relevant issue to solve was attracting professionals in the sector who can contribute their experience and trajectory, since without these references, the success of the company becomes very difficult, because the learning curve if the entire workforce is new is made very long, with the exposure this has to the market, due to possible failures in the quality of the finished product. This objective should be achieved without breaking the future remuneration scheme, nor creating insurmountable inequalities once it is implemented.
This last point is important if you want to promote teamwork, since we all measure the effort comparing it with the remuneration we receive, if we believe that there are significant inequalities, we will not feel that the idea of moving the new company forward, commits us all. in the same way, so that individualistic behaviors that in our case would have disarticulated the strategy and culture of the new venture could be promoted.
At this point, we could not see more than the advantages of the new structure, so that after overcoming the most conservative positions and the uncertainty regarding the unknown, it was decided to bet on a more flexible model, focused on people and the development of their skills. and not on the job and perfecting a repeated technique to exhaustion.
The production areas were respected, but within them the traditional model was not applied, where each person is assigned a task, but the tasks were grouped in a broader scheme to be carried out by all the people in the section. Achieving greater versatility and flexibility, in addition to developing individual and collective capacities. This produces that the knowledge of the final product is greater, which allows contributions to improve the process and promote teamwork, to better understand the work of others, because yesterday was mine.
Although achieving this is a gradual process that must be carried out without jeopardizing productivity, or ignorance of the largest individual contributions in certain positions, it allows the remuneration scheme to award in a variable way those people who are mastering the different tasks of its section and later those of others, to generate a scheme of several steps, according to the professional level that recognizes above all the person and their competences, aligning them with the business strategy.
