If you ignore your car's routine servicing and maintenance requirements, it doesn't take long to feel the effects. Forget to change the oil, and metallic particles accumulate, eventually damaging the engine irreparably. A neglected timing chain can mean sudden death for an otherwise functional automobile.
Funny how we coddle our machines but drive ourselves (and sometimes our employees) mercilessly. For a human being, scheduled maintenance could follow Abraham Maslow's familiar "hierarchy of needs." Human maintenance -- ranging from physical to emotional, mental, and spiritual upkeep -- requires attention to people's physiological (food, water, shelter, sleep), safety, and social needs, as well as the need for self-esteem and self-actualization.
Fail to maintain the human engine, and its performance will decline. Feed it potato chips and soda, place it in hazardous conditions, isolate it, deny it opportunities to learn and excel, and it will become tired, cranky, unmotivated, and clumsy. It will experience illness and accidents. Eventually, harmed beyond repair, it will stop performing entirely. Those that continue to function require more time and effort to achieve less and less.
Log some time at the woodpile
If you don't believe it, try this little exercise:- Cut up firewood all day (8 hours) with a dull saw.
- Place all the wood from your day's work in a pile.
- The next day, assuming you can still lift the saw, sharpen it before you start cutting.
- Determine how long you can cut before the blade dulls noticeably. Use that as your "scheduled maintenance" guide.
- Continue cutting, stopping to sharpen the saw at scheduled intervals.
- After you've been cutting for 8 hours, stop and place all the newly cut wood in a second pile.
Many companies are finding that sharpening the saw with "benefits" like fitness programs, education and training, family-friendly policies, profit-sharing or gainsharing is valuable not just for recruiting but for optimizing employee performance. (FORTUNE magazine's "100 best companies to work for" are rewarded with higher profitability.) Likewise, business owners and executives - possibly as a result of eating and drinking too much, sleeping too little, estranging their families, abandoning their spirituality, and failing to keep up with developments in their industries - are discovering that their "best" is no longer good enough.
Spare parts are hard to find
What are your company's objectives? Can they all be accomplished with machinery? If so, you probably have made arrangements to keep your equipment in good working order. But if, as is likely, human energy and intelligence -- including yours -- are part of the process, what's your strategy for keeping your humans in top form? How effective is your OWN personal maintenance plan?Remember, human equipment failure can't always be reversed with an overhaul. The worse cases -- where basic components break down -- end up on the junk heap.
