Steps Toward Successful Teamwork At AMETEK Aerospace
Teams Work: Lessons From Successful Organizations - 2001 - By Will Friedman
In a 50,000-square-foot facility on the outskirts of a small, working-class city in upstate New York, AMETEK Aerospace produces aircraft sensors, instrumentation, and other products critical to commercial aviation. More than 80 percent of the plant's approximately 200 employees do hands-on assembly in self-directed work teams. These "operations colleagues," as they are called, are supported by a small squad of manufacturing engineers, material planners, team coaches, and the plant's management team. The entire organization and culture are designing with one purpose in mind: to ensure that production teams operate at high and continuously improving levels of performance.
This case study examines how teams evolved at AMETEK, hoe they operate, and their cutting-edge issues as they look to the future. It draws on presentations by AMETEK mangers and team members at Work in America Symposia, a Work in America Site Visit to the plant, and focus group interviews with 24 production workers.
From the Dream of Teams to Dream Teams
AMETEK Aerospace in Binghamton, New York, was established in 1994 as a model factory by AMETEK, Inc., a global concern with 41 manufacturing operations worldwide and close to a billion dollars in annual sales. Among the attributes to be modeled by the Greenfield plant was employee involvement, a core corporate value and strategy for high performance. As a corporate vision statement puts it, the company seeks to "encourage the participation of AMETEK colleagues," and "treat our colleagues with respect while providing opportunities to share in the responsibilities fro AMETEK success as well as the rewards of achievement." The Binghamton operation was to give life to these words, and self-directed work teams have been the main instrument for doing so.
That the plant had located in Binghamton was a matter of savvy opportunism. In the early 1990s corporate leadership at AMETK got wind of the closing of a former GE Aerospace plant near Binghamton that, through a corporate merger, had ended up under the management of Martin Marietta. By locating in the region, AMETEK was able to draw workers already accustomed to teamwork and total quality, and, in fact, the first 70 or so AMETEK hires were form among those former GE employees. This made it an unusual Greenfield situation - perhaps we could call it "Greenfield plus". For not only was there no established modus operandi and culture to transcend on the road to high-performance teamwork, there was actually a reservoir of team-oriented talent to draw from to establish the right tone from the outset. Perhaps the best way to characterize that tone is simultaneously high performance and highly caring.
A High-Performance, Yet Highly Caring Culture
The plant has established a culture that revolves around poles that are something thought to be contradictory but that at AMETEK prove to be complementary. For its culture, palpable to visitors within ten minutes, is oriented toward high performance and continuous improvement on the one hand, and toward the personal touch and a high quality of working life on the other. The commitment to these two dimensions is evident in the plant's mission statement, which calls for both a "total quality management culture" and a "supportive facility."
The emphasis on productivity, total quality, and high performance will be plainly evident as the plant's intensive training programs and continuous improvement initiatives are described in the sections that follow. But to offer one example ere of how this aspect of the culture is reinforced, a rewards and recognition program allows workers to nominate any other worker for a $10 gift certificate for excellence in customer service, continuous improvement, teamwork, or general business conduct. (Incidentally, this initiative was adapted from AMETEK's observation of another company on a Work in America Site Visit.)
On the highly caring side of the equation, AMETEK has made a strong and creative commitment to work/life balance through flexible start times, floating holidays, one-hour vacation increments, and special summer hour options. The plant also offers numerous health and wellness programs, and craft classes, and employees can always expect to receive personalized birthday, holiday, and sympathy cards. Halloween has been raised to the level of a major cultural phenomenon as teams vie to outdo each other in the elaborateness and outrageousness of their costumes. And numerous community involvement initiatives, such as food drives and cancer walkers, link employees yet more closely to one another and to the larger community.
IN all of these ways a culture that is at once high performance and highly caring is reinforced. Indeed, it is communicated to employees from day one.
Getting the Right Employees off to the Right Start
Job applicants for line positions are assessed on team behaviors by team members in a four-step process intended to predict performance in a self-directed team environment. Candidates are assessed on key behaviors with regard to teamwork, initiative, coaching skills, work standards, communication skills, leadership skills and problem solving. Thus, although management makes the final hiring decision, there is strong employee involvement in all-new hires, from line workers to management.
Those who are selected do not go straight to the factory floor. Instead they undergo a three- to four-week "Core training," during which they are paid as temporary employees, on team, technical, and business skills and knowledge. His initial, or core, training provides new hires with a running start, enabling them to contribute to their teams production goals right away and minimizing disruption as new people are brought up to speed. It also demonstrates AMETEK"S commitment to team and individual training and development, reinforcing the plant's total quality/continuous improvement culture.
While AMETEK is convinced that a solid dose of core training prior to working on the shop floor helps prepare new employees for effective teamwork. It also finds that there can be too much of a good thing. Only so much training is warranted before there is a real-world context for applying the skills. Indeed, increasing prework training can, AMETEK finds, bring diminishing returns, as training burnout seems to occur after a few weeks for these employees, who have yet to be confronted with the real-life challenges of the job.
AMETEK has also found that the initial training must provide a mix of soft (people) skills and technical learning. Even if much of the rationale for the core training is to orient new hires to team culture and such teamwork tasks as setting goals, solving problems, leading meetings, and communicating effectively, it is the technical training that seems the most practical, concrete, and compelling to many new recruits. Technical training must therefore be a major focus to maintain the interest of workers, most of who, have never experienced a team environment and who cannot, therefore, fully appreciate its challenges and demands in the abstract.
Core training ends with a graduation ceremony attended b all employees, who warmly welcome the new graduates. These rookies are presented with graduation plaques, which are hung on a wall near the plant's entrance in recognition of their new status. New employee are then assigned to a production team, based on the management teams assessment of their best fit, and assigned a team mentor to further their orientation.
Physical Space Designed with Teams in Mind
The new employees who join teams do so in a physical environment designed to support and reinforce a participative culture through it physical layout. The factory floor was designed as an open environment, with as few walls as possible, to encourage the free flow of information, people, and product. Teams are generally housed around the floor in clear arrangements (e.g., a horseshoe pattern of tables, workbenches, and tools). And support staff, such as quality engineers and team coaches, are housed accessibly in cubicles without doors.
The symbolism of physical space is also supplied to the seemingly prosaic problem of parking, which is first come, first serve, with no designated spaces. The result is to reinforce the picture of a flat organization, in which people share responsibilities and perks equitably. Indeed, managers, who tend to arrive after the shift has begun, usually end up parked farthest from the plant. Similarly, a large, open cafeteria provides a place where people can mix easily and "provides some unique opportunities to discuss not only business but also personal issues," according to John Ziegenfus, AMETEK's training administrator.
How Teams are Structured and Roles Defined
Currently, 25 teams operate at AMETEK over two shifts. Most are organized around specific products and are responsible for virtually all aspects of its assembly, soup to nuts. The plant also has cross-functional teams made up of operations colleagues who staff them on a part-time basis. These teams handle issues that do not fall naturally into the province of an ongoing production unit, such as safety and ergonomics, health and wellness, rewards and recognition, and emergency response.
Team size is determined by the manufacturing requirements for a given product, ranging from 2 to 28 members, with most between 4 and 12. In many instances, the size of a product team shrank significantly as production became more efficient with "excess" members shifting to new teams, where more help was needed. The plant has so far avoided layoffs because demands has gradually increased since the plant opened and because temporary workers are used to augment teams during temporary demand spikes. Some thought is being given to restructuring the largest teams into smaller, more manageable units. But whatever their size, all production teams are structures with continuous learning an improvement in mind.
According to Robert Hyland, a former plant manager at AMETEK, high -performing teams feel a great deal of ownership and accountability for results and are therefore active in managing their own performance. In order for them to do so successfully, they need leadership and structure, they need to know how to measure performance and "keep score," and they need team members who "feel they can improve." The question of how to accomplish this for AMETEK was tackled early in the plant's history by a cross-functional design team that, according to Hyland, was "chartered with the task of addressing this need." After two years of meetings, benchmarking, and collecting input form the operational teams, the team presented what was to become the basis for AMETEK's "operation Colleagues Team Structure." This section describes that structure.
AMETEK's teams operate under a shared-leadership model, with all line workers sharing a single job classification, "operations colleague." Each operations colleague is cross-trained for maximum flexibility and rotation among both production jobs and a number of well-defined team tasks. Team "building blocks" (adapted by AMETEK from its work with PDS, Inc., consultants) is a system for organizing team leadership roles to ensure consistency and continuity in such key areas of function and performance as scheduling, continuous improvement, total quality, "producibility," team dynamics, and safety. Team members rotate among these roles, each of which has specific responsibilities with respect to setting goals, tracking performance data, and, generally, acting as the focal point for that aspect of the teams' work. While each of these is a leadership role, two are considered to be at the heart of team functioning: the scheduler, who keeps the team responsive to the plant's business goals and schedule, and the person who oversees the team's regular continuous improvement (CI) meetings and initiatives.
Additionally, each team is linked to one of three coaches who assist teams in meeting team goals through training and other support activities, and a manger who is responsible for the team's area of production. But all the teams are viewed and treated as primarily self-directed units that must themselves take primary responsibility for meeting production goals and implementing continuous improvement initiatives.
An important tool teams use to do this is a six-step problem-solving process to tackle production issues that arise and toe generally improve production processes. It involves setting goals, identifying and analyzing problems, generating potential solutions, gaining approval and support for a particular solution, and implementing action and follow-up. This structured approach is considered a key tool for the continuous improvement initiatives of production teams and a tool for cross-functional ad hoc teams that are tackling a plant-wide issue.
According to John Ziegenfus, these are the key lessons AMETEK has learned about weaving structured problem-solving processes into the fabric of teamwork:
- The entire team should go through the process together in order to gain maximum input and to reinforce shared responsibility for outcomes;
- Teams sometimes ignore "low-hanging fruit" during problem solving and reach for elaborate or difficult solutions when a simpler answer might suffice;
- Teams need a high degree of support and coaching during implementation to ensure that problem solving translates into effective action; and
- The formal problem solving process is slow and demanding and should be reserved for worthy challenges.
A Commitment to Training
As the above discussion makes clear, AMETEK believes that if employees are to succeed in their many roles and responsibilities, they need the requisite skills and knowledge. The commitment to training, therefore, is on going and does not stop after the core orientation described earlier. For example, the problem-solving process discussed in the last section is offered as a regular training option (see fig. 1).
In addition to training in "soft" teamwork skills, there is ample training in the technical requirements of the job, and operations colleagues are challenged to learn and perform at least 70 percent of a team's production tasks. Such cross0training is viewed as a systematic process to develop proficiency and flexibility within teams. It creates the capacity to adjust quickly to changing customer demands, and it helps workers avoid burnout or ergonomic stress by shifting jobs. AMETEK also believes there are less easily measured benefits to cross-training, such as bringing out the hidden talents of team members (you don't know it you don't try) or bringing "fresh eyes" to long-established processes so that colleagues can something see new and better ways to get things done.
Cross training is organized around a knowledge/performance matrix and checklist that spells out skills and knowledge to be mastered for each team. Tasks and knowledge to be mastered to each team. Tasks and knowledge are assumed to be dynamic and changing, so most operations colleagues require requalification every two years. Individual training records, with competency-level determinations by employees, managers, and trainers are kept for each employee.
The plant also provides training leading to technical certificates in specialized production processes, some of which are mandatory and some of which are taken up at the initiative of employees, these include testing and troubleshooting, major inspections, and documentation, each of which requires 12 to 24 hours of training and recertification every two to three years, SO that they do not proliferate for their own sake. AMETEK's technical certification programs are limited to critical production processes and are offered based on current business needs.
To support its training efforts, management had forged a partnership with a local community college, augmented its training budget through state training grants, and created a training database that team coaches and employees can access. And to encourage and reward employees for taking advantage of training resources, the plant offered flexibility pay, over and above base compensation, that rewards employees for creating flexibility both within the team san the larger organization. These additional amounts are added to hourly wages for developing a range of skills in three main areas: leadership (through the six building blocks); technical skills (thorough specialized production certifications); and cross training in team production (by learning at least 70 percent of the jobs on a production team).
The comment of an employee during a Work in America Site Visit to AMETEK in the fall of 2000 was illustrative of the plant's high-performance culture, She argued that employees should learn 100 percent, not 70 percent, of a team's production teaks before receiving maximum flex pay. Evidently the advantages to the team of everyone understanding everything was even more important to her than the compensation.
Making Communications a Priority
Yet another key to teamwork at AMETEK is communications through a variety of methods, both within teams and plant-wide. For example, teams typically start their shift with a short stand-up meeting and hold regular (usually weekly) continuous improvement sessions to assess progress and plan new initiatives (see fig. 2).
AMETEK believes teams can make their best contribution to the business as a whole if they are kept informed of the big picture beyond their immediate production challenges, such as changing business conditions, customer needs, and plant policies. Monthly all-employee meetings in the cafeteria and newsletters help accomplish this. And "business update breakfasts" with smaller groups of employees and the plant manager serve as a way to gain input from a cross-section of employees. The payoff for being "very up front and honest with our people about the business climate," according to Training Administrator Ziegenfus, is flexibility. He explains:
Operations colleagues know that some of our divisions have sent work to Mexico, for example. They know what the business conditions are like. And they know that we need to be flexible and we need to be lean. And I think we get away with it because we are honest with them in our communications. For example, we have a documented process for team movement that [employees participate in], Management decides when [teams need to expand or contract] and the team decides who comes or goes.
Yet another important communications initiative, and one uniquely illustrative of AMETEK's employee-driven approach, is its "All Colleagues Survey," to identify employee issues and concerns. The survey is designed and analyzed by an employee team with the support of local academic researchers, and results often lead to the formation of ad hoc improvement teams.
Results and Future Directions
AMETEK's incorporation of high-performance, team-based system has led to solid business results, including the establishment of strongly positive customer and regulatory relations. For instance, AMETEK has received the Sikorsky Outstanding Supplier Award, passed its first FAA audit with no observations or findings, and also passed its ISO 9002 registration with no findings. The pant has measurably improved productivity and response time through it operational excellence projects. A corporate Safety and Environmental Protection Audit has stated that the Binghamton plant "could be a model of other facilities to follow." And, no small matter in today's manufacturing environment, the plant has never had a layoff.
As for the future, according to our focus groups, many employees feel that the plant's most pressing future need is for management and teams to work together more effectively to manage team discipline and conflict. As one respondent put it, "you get two or three people on a team who don't believe in the team stuff and say, 'I'm not doing it,' and you're in trouble."
Several current initiatives have the potential to make headway on precisely this issue. For example, AMETEK is about to implement a new Team Audit process to create baseline and regularly track team progress in a series of team processes. The audit process will be used in part to relaunch teams, a few at a time. Management is also developing new team leadership and conflict resolution training modules, reviewing its rewards and recognition programs for team performance, and planning to implement a 360-degree assessment process for team leaders and a structural mentoring program for individuals who are performing poorly.
Such initiatives are bound to fall on fertile ground at AMETEK because the commitment to continuous improvement seems so well established, as illustrated by the discussion in one of the focus groups of the new plant manager. One worker pointed out ,"He said he's going to take us to a higher level, and I really think he could," to which another replied, "I hope so. We ready." This readiness to grow may well be the greatest asset AMETEK has going for it and bodes well for its future as an evolving team-based organization.
Reference: Friedman, W. & Casner-Lotto, J. (2001). Steps toward Successful Teamwork at AMETEK Aerospace. Teams Work, Lessons from successful Organizations (pp.69-75). Scarsdale, New York: Work in America Institute, Inc.
