Employee Reactions

Originally, employees reactions to workplace changes were skeptical. Some believed that the pain that they experienced was just, “part of the job” while others were so worried about losing their production bonuses that they believed that they would prefer enduring the pain. The idea of using holding fixtures did not yield an encouraging response and it was not until the plant’s manager and production manager made fixtures mandatory for all employees performing polishing work that they were used by most employees. The results of this requirement were extremely encouraging.

Despite original, negative beliefs regarding holding fixtures, employees’ opinions about fixtures during a second, follow-up interviews were almost entirely positive. I redistributed my original questionnaire and spoke again with all polishing workers at the end of the summer, once every employee had been using a holding fixture for at least one week. A common response was, “I never thought I could have used one of these things but, now that they made us try them, I don’t think I could polish clubs without one,” with comments such as, “I really have to eat my words now.” Proof of this reported improvement lies in reported pain at the time of the second interviews as well as employee production rate analysis with and without a fixture.

At the time of the first interview, 93 percent of polishers reported experiencing pain or numbing in their extremities. By the second interviews, with the introduction of more serious stretching during breaks, machine maintenance improvements, and most importantly, holding fixtures being unanimously used, only 27 percent of employees reported pain, and of those people, only one failed to notice a noticeable improvement in how they felt after using a fixture everyday. In addition, rate of production after implementing fixtures failed to drop, as was suggested by many operators. In some cases, employees were actually producing higher quality output at an increased rate while using fixtures.