The riffs on this joke are endless:
TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.
A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.
A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full
employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who
reported the numbers.
AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You sell one and force the other to produce the milk
of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.
The American riff is rapidly moving from the “funny” category to “not so funny anymore.”
A side-effect of the Great Resignation.
An employee leaves. You can’t replace them immediately. Their work has to be divided among the remaining employees, causing these employees further stress. Consequently, more leave. Repeat ad infinitum.
This unfortunate phenomenon appears to be replicating itself in many industries, particularly among low-wage workers.
Josh Howell, president of the Lean Enterprise Institute, addressed one aspect of this issue in an Industry Week article. It’s entitled, “When the Work Is Awful, The Job Will Remain Unfilled.”
He cites one case he observed in a shipping room:
“I watched an operator struggling to build and fill cardboard boxes with finished goods. The operator was isolated on a sprawling island of a workstation. Piles of boxes in various shapes and sizes were scattered around. For every box and piece of work, the operator had to go get it. Walking to locate and retrieve correct-sized boxes contributed to the operator falling behind, which led to a growing pile of finished goods waiting to be packaged. Then, when a type of box ran out, the operator had to go get more. As a result, the finished goods pile continued to grow. So the operator picked up the pace, nearly tripping over an improperly parked forklift.
“Just observing was stressful. Frankly, the work was awful. And worse, as all of this was happening, all of these problems, no one was around to help.”
Wages weren’t the problem, Howell adds. “The company offers relatively high wages. Keeping people is the problem. ‘In fact,’ my host said, ‘someone quit the other day after working only one shift.’”
Howell’s suggestions are heavily spiced with efficiency jargon from the Japanese: “kaizen,” “gemba,” “kanban.” I’ll leave you to look those up for yourself.
I would simply invoke common decency and common sense. Putting things in boxes is not what most people associate with work fulfillment, but somebody has to do it. How are these employees treated?
You can’t make the job other than what it is, but you can do a great deal to make sure it is no more unpleasant than it has to be and that they are not persecuted with petty, niggling tasks (micromanagers, please note).
In other cases, like the one that Howell describes, it may simply involve moving a stack of boxes closer to a packing line or a loading dock.
In still other cases, it may require a good, hard look at the quantity of work and the number of employees, calculating them rationally and humanely, and making the necessary adjustments. Down to a triage of what really has to be done now and what can be put off for a little while.
With practically all problems, common sense is the first thing people should consult. But often they don’t get around to consulting it at all.
