Self Managed Work Teams

Management at Bill and Dave's has made some pretty bad decisions over the years. Well, I'll be blunt. They've made some seriously fucking stupid decisions over the years. One of the worst was a concept they got hold of and implemented across some of the divisions called Self Managed Work Teams. The idea was this: chop the dicks off of your line supervisors and put them in some sort of screwy adviser role that no one will understand, then empower your manufacturing employees to write each other's evaluations and figure out how they will get boxes out the door to customers. Sounds great, doesn't it? Not really. For the most part this half baked idea was a complete disaster.

Spokane is the only division I've been in where the Self Managed Work Team is active and in place. Everywhere else in the company already got rid of it since it didn't work worth a shit. Why the Spokane folks are still using this style of management is a mystery to me, then again alot of stuff here seems really backwards so what the hell. I've asked Don alot about what he thinks of it and what has happened here as a result of the SMWT thing. It's all pretty bad. He said during the first few rounds of peer written evaluations, some employees were given poor marks by their coworkers and as a result didn't get a raise. Sometimes it was for real reasons but other times people panned their fellow employees just to be mean. To retaliate these people would then in turn also write bad evals for the people that originally gave them a negative review. After a while everyone was practically ranked at the bottom of the barrel and no one was going to receive a merit increase in their wages. It was all a downward spiral of hate.

In a feeble attempt to get control of the situation, the SKD management team opened up the guidelines on who could write an evaluation. Instead of having a coworker on your line write one for you (that would probably be suicide), they allowed people to go shop around for an employee outside of your work area that would write a favorable review. At first this made some sense, but once again the pendulum swung way too far over to the other side. Employees could go find someone in an area they barely knew and had nothing to do with the kind of work you did. In a way those write ups were just about as inconsistent and worthless but at least you weren't going to get raked through the coals by your immediate coworkers. Don said one time he had someone's secretary write a review for him. Cool, I guess. Either way it all seems dumb to me and I wonder how they've been able to get along this whole time with such a useless system in place.