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Engagement, modern manufacturing, and why we work

So what makes an “engaged” employee, really? What’s the difference between an employee who, say, misses a clamp or two on a robot welding cell and causes a major breakdown, versus one consistently produces quality parts?

According to a few researchers highlighted in a recent TED Radio Hour podcast, you can blame Henry Ford and his contemporaries.

Before the industrial age, people really didn’t talk about “workplace satisfaction.” A career wasn’t a choice; it was often just what your family did. You dad was a blacksmith, so you were going to be a blacksmith. All day you faced different challenges, worked on different jobs, talked to different people. In that sense, work resembled everything else in life: a variety of tasks, some pleasant, some not, but they all required a person to concentrate and think about a variety of tasks.

Then came industrialization and the narrow view of work. The tasks became utterly different from what sane people would do outside the office or factory. They did one thing—insert this piece into that slot, file these papers into these folders—over and over and over. This was supposedly the most efficient way to accomplish a task, but it also rewired how people thought about their job. They disengaged and thought of their occupation as, at best, “just a job,” and at worst, a necessary evil to put food on the table—a coping mechanism to deal with the mind-numbing monotony.

Now of course you really can’t make a good living doing one thing all day every day. Most forms of manufacturing, including nearly all of metal fabrication, operate in a high-product-mix environment. A person in a fab shop’s assembly department usually doesn’t insert hardware or connect one panel to the next all day, every day, for weeks or months on end. Sure, you have the occasional big order, but if that happens, a shop brings in more people to help, the part program ends, and the assembler moves on to another (often very different) project.

The problem is that many people still seem disengaged, probably for a variety of reasons. People don’t trust companies to provide them with secure employment anymore, particularly in this era of globalization. An employer may also have a “command and control” kind of environment, where front-line employees feel they don’t have a voice. Considering all this, calling work “just a job” may be a good way to cope with all the frustration and uncertainty.

But there’s a silver lining: Few jobs in metal fabrication now are truly repetitive, and they no longer force people to turn our brains off and engage in mind-numbing activities all day. This at least gives fab shop owners a good foundation to build a disciplined, engaged workforce that has a voice in how things are accomplished.

About the Author
The Fabricator

Tim Heston

Senior Editor

2135 Point Blvd

Elgin, IL 60123

815-381-1314

Tim Heston, The Fabricator's senior editor, has covered the metal fabrication industry since 1998, starting his career at the American Welding Society's Welding Journal. Since then he has covered the full range of metal fabrication processes, from stamping, bending, and cutting to grinding and polishing. He joined The Fabricator's staff in October 2007.