College graduates make up a small percentage of the population in many countries. Obtaining a degree puts one in an elite group. New graduates approaching the guardhouse at the entrance are a little intimidated. The guards are authoritative; the person sweeping the walks has worked at the plant a long time. Then there’s the sign-in log at the reception desk. About that time it can be difficult for one to remember that he or she is part of that elite group.
Once settled at a desk one starts to wonder, “What do I do now?” Usually the new employee is paired up with another employee to get on the job training. After a couple of weeks there are short assignments that are checked closely by the boss. There always are projects large and small to work on and if done right one can count on collecting a paycheck for a while to come. That may satisfy a lot of people but it’s not the best way to get a promotion or a substantial pay increase.
The company needs individuals with vision and leadership skills. So here is the way to make it from the back of the line to the front without having to stop in the middle, it’s a lot easier than one would imagine. Get a really big sheet of paper out. Start by analyzing what the plant does and then how it does it. Hopefully one has had plenty of training at the university on what the different functions are. At the simplest level every plant receives materials and transforms them into products for its customers. Back to the really big paper, on the left side write “Material In” and the right “Products Out”. In between the “In” and the “Out” make notes on what needs to be done. You know that material is received, it must be checked to make sure that it’s right. At most there will be up to a dozen or so different processes, humans make errors so the products need to be checked to make sure that they have been made, as they should be. The next step is to get an organization chart for the plant and see who is responsible for each activity. Go to each department and ask how each job is performed. Who receives the material? Who makes sure that it’s correct (meets the specifications defined by engineering.)? How many different products does the plant produce? How many units are processed in a day, week, and month? Who processes the materials? Who checks to make sure that the products were made the way that they were supposed to? Who packs and ships the products? Your boss will know what the each department executes each of the tasks.
Think of this exercise as being something like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Every experience is like a piece of the puzzle. The analogy becomes a bit strained considering that the pieces in an actual puzzle fit together perfectly and that is not always the case in the plant (not talking about the products here). In their case they better fit together perfectly.) Sometimes it seems as though someone took a piece out of each of five-hundred different puzzles and put them all in on box. Identifying all the steps that go into converting materials into finished products how they are performed, and by who is analogous to having a picture of what the one finished puzzle should look like.
Getting an extraordinary pay increase.
If you want a raise in pay, you will need to impress everyone in the operation, not just your boss.
It easy to assume that everyone knows exactly what is expected of him or her. Accountants know what their job is, so do engineers.Bosses aren’t much different that you, they would like to have a raise in pay as much as you would. Here are the basic issues that you will have to deal with before you go into the office to discuss that extraordinary raise.
Raises are generally awarded once a year and are associated with your performance review.
Bosses are given a specific percentage that they are permitted to award. They may also be given a total amount that they can distribute to their department as they see fit.
There are pay ranges for every position. These pay ranges can me modified annually to coincide with the market.
Your place on the salary range can be the result of where you where in the range when you were hired. If you were in the low range you are likely to stay there unless you do something about it.
Performance reviews tend to be pretty subjective. The categories that you are evaluated on are things likes, “quality of work”, “quantity of work”, “organizational ability”, etc. and are rated between unacceptable and exceptional. The reality is that your boss already has an idea about how much he wants to give you and simply massages the ratings to justify that amount. By the way, I have yet to find someone that likes to fill these out or be on the receiving end.
He or she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings by telling you that not only do you not deserve on but may not deserve the salary that you’re getting now.
Everyone in the plant thinks that they deserve an extraordinary pay increase. Your boss knows that if you get one everyone else will be clamoring for equal treatment.
By extraordinary I’m talking about a raise that’s higher than the general amount given each year or a raise that’s outside of your review cycle. There’s much more to it than just getting the nerve to go into the boss’s office and asking for one. I’ve been that boss and I can assure you that there are ways to get what you want. Convincing your boss that you deserve a hefty increase is a negotiation. The basic rule of entering into a negotiation is to be prepared. That means having a clear understanding of what it is that you want, what the least that you will accept is and what the most that you are willing to give in return is. So let’s get to it.
What you’ll need first is a formal job description. There should be one in the company manual. All of the operations that I’ve been associated with had descriptions for every position in the plant. If yours doesn’t get on the Internet and find one. This is the first step in determining what you are going to do in your part of the bargain. You may be doing some wonderful things in the plant but you have to make sure that you are not neglecting all the other things that are expected from you. If you have any doubts about the job description now’s a good time to clarify those doubts with your boss.
The second piece of information that you will need is what the pay range is for your position. Generally there is a range for salaries within a position. There can be a pretty big difference between the lowest and highest amounts. If you are at the top of your range it’s very unlikely that you will be able to get a big increase without a change in position or by being promoted to the next level in your job category. If you are in the low end of your range you have something to work with. There are several jobs in plants that are categorized in more that one level. One plant in Nogales, Sonora had four levels for industrial engineers each with its own pay range.
Let me stop here and tell you about my experience with that operation. It was there that I took charge of the industrial engineering department. My arrival coincided with the time for pay reviews. The records showed that each engineer was categorized at a specific grade numbered from 1 to 4, with four being the most responsibility and the highest on the pay scale. Oddly enough not one of the seventeen engineers had actually seen their job descriptions. Not one could tell me how to go about moving from one pay grade to another. They figured that it was just a matter of being with the company for a certain amount of time and getting a favorable performance review. One even mentioned that on once two engineers resigned, the company panicked and gave everyone a raise. Well, that’s one way to get an increase, but not one that you could control.
Level one engineers were recent graduates who would be given short assignments that reviewed by the supervisor regularly. Level four engineers had been working in the field for at least five years, were experts in one of the areas industrial engineering (e.g., layouts, methods, time-studies, etc.), could identify potential improvement projects without direction and introduce a technology not previously used the plant.
Once you’ve determined what your potential is within the organizational and pay structure you can go back to your job description. It would be pretty safe to say that you should be qualified to perform all of those tasks in the description. It doesn’t necessary mean that you have performed all of those tasks; there may not have been a need for all of them in your plant. Your annual performance reviews should be a fair assessment of how well you’ve carried out your assigned tasks. If the reviews have been less than stellar you need to do some work before you go on thinking about that raise.
Assuming that your boss thinks that you are a good worker you should go ahead and ask if there is a policy, written or otherwise, regarding when additional increases can be awarded. In my case I gave additional and non-scheduled increases when I was losing machinists faster than I could replace them. Obviously their market value was higher than what I was paying. In other cases the person that earned a big raise clearly deserved it.
I’ll give you a good example of such a person. He was a maintenance mechanic at the electronic connector plant I managed in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. The person was a maintenance mechanic. I had been observing an operation that consisted of four drill presses, each manned by an operator. The first operator would pick up a large tub of connectors; pick-up and process individual pieces then place them back into another tub. The next operator would pick up the tub and perform a second operation on each piece. The last two operators did much the same. I didn’t like the idea of the operators lifting those heavy tubs. I also saw that it was a waste of effort for each operator to have to orient each part over again at their station, the first operator had already done that. I arranged for Jose to pick up an aluminum rail the width of the product. Then I showed him that by placing the rail across the four machines the first operator could orient each piece, perform the operation, and then push the pieces down the rail to the next station. That eliminated each operator having to pick-up the heavy tubs then picking-up each piece and orienting it before performing each operation. We installed the rail and the method worked flawlessly. The next morning Jose showed me a drawing applying the rail concept to a far more complex production line with twenty-five operators.
“Jose, what would it take to put something like this together?”
“Nothing, I stayed late last night and put installed everything. It’s been working since seven this morning. It’s great! The operators all like it and we’re getting a lot more output per hour. Wanna see it?”
“Of course I did.”
That was only the first in a long list of Jose’s successful projects. I’m not going to tell you how much of a raise I gave him because it will get you too excited. But I can tell you this; it was a good, extraordinary and deserved one.
Everyone in the plant thinks that they deserve a raise. If you give someone a raise they think that they should get one as well. I’m not talking about the usual annual reviews and raises; I’m talking about the extraordinary one that you want. Actually there is something else that will make it easier for your boss to give you a raise: everyone else in the plant thinks that you should get one.
Here’s a case of someone that did just that. Alfredo was a production manager. Our accountant complained to me one morning that getting signed time cards from Alfredo’s supervisors. It was a weekly struggle. The cards had to be processed to prepare the payroll. The human resource manager complained that when a reduction in personnel was required she had to hunt Alfredo down and help him determine where the reductions would be made.
Alfredo approached me one morning about a pay raise. He wasn’t at the top of his pay range so the possibility was there.
“Alfredo, the accountant and the human resources manager have both complained about your performance. Martha has to send her people to your supervisors every week to get their late time cards and Julia has to decide where personnel reductions will come from for you. You do a lot of good work but questions my judgment and credibility in their eyes if I were to give you a raise at this time.”
Alfredo got the message and he proceeded to turn the situation around. After a couple of months both Martha and Julia came to my office to tell me about what a great job Alfredo was doing and that I should really consider giving him a pay raise.
Most people don’t realize that others talk about their work. If it’s poor it’s talked about and if it’s good it’s talked about as well, much more so if it’s exceptional. I remember telling Pablo, the solder-wav machine operator, that we had been talking about him and his fine work during our staff meeting.
“You were talking about me?”
“No kidding you were talking about me?”
“Wow, they were talking about me!”
Trust me, people know who you are and how you work. Use that to your advantage. Provide service to others on time and done well. Help others when you can. It’ll pay off.
During my walks through the plant I would hear griping from production personnel about the kind of service that they were getting from the support departments. Looking for more details I asked them about Mario, a quality engineer’s service. The responses ranged from “lousy” to “my mother always told me that if I didn’t have something good to say about someone that I shouldn’t say anything at all.” Enough said.
Here’s the odd part. When the managers turned in their recommendations for pay increases Mario’s boss submitted the highest pay increase in the plant for him. Obviously Mario did a great of impressing his boss but not such a great job of impressing those that he was supposed to service. I relate the conversations I had with the personnel on the production floor with Mario’s boss. Needless to say that pay raise did not go through, Mario and his boss had some work to do. Clearly winning the respect of others in the plant is no less important that winning the respect of your supervisor.
It should be pretty clear by now that being prepared with all this information makes the discussion of a raise a lot easier for both of you and your boss.
I’ve discovered that if you provide the services to others in the plant on time and well done, and you are helpful and attentive your boss will hear this: “You better give (fill in your name here) or you’re going to lose him/her”. When everyone else in the plant thinks that you deserve a raise it’s much easier for your boss to give you one.
Part of contributing more is that everybody in the plant knows it.
See problems, see them as opportunities.
Passion is probably the essential element that you need to do well. If you really love what you’re doing you’ll dive right in and do the best you can to help solve it. If you’d rather head the other way forge that raise, it’s not going to happen.
If you are interested in a position let it be known
Each time I’ve taken on a plant management position I ask who on the staff interviewed for the job and why didn’t one of them get the position. There’s always a list of reasons. “They’re smart and valuable to the company but they don’t have the drive”, “they don’t answer questions directly”, “they are not real strong on innovative problem solving”, “they are not team players”, or simply, “we just didn’t think that they were ready.” (whatever that may mean.)
So, what is one to do? Once you decide that there’s a position that you would like to have tell your boss about it. If he or she is confident you’ll find that they will automatically start teaching you the fine points of their job. Make sure that you tell them first; otherwise they may think that you’re planning some sort of coup.
Next tell the human resource manager. While you are it ask for a job description. That’s what they’ll be using when they need to fill that position. With that description you can determine if you fulfill each requirement. You can firm up the ones that you do and start to develop those you don’t.
Assume that you will have competition. You’re probably not the only one that wants the position. There were always two people already working in the plant that tossed their hat in the ring in each of the operations where I was hired.
Learn to take criticism.
People in different societies respond to criticism in different ways. First thing that I can tell you is that nobody likes it. It’s how they react that is important. In the US when we say that someone is educated in means that they have a college education, period. In many countries, to be educated, or “educado” in Spanish speaking countries, means to be gracious and attentive. Early on in my career in Mexico, before I learned the ways of the “educado”, I suspect that I unknowingly said something ungracious some people’s work performance. The result, the individual came in early, headed to the human resources department and resigned. In the US I would have expected a resounding “Oh, yeah?”
Don’t make enemies. Don’t try to get ahead by making others look bad.
The most important person in your career besides your wife is your boss.
Find out how you are doing on your job right now. (Good place to include the story about the engineers at General Instrument)
Don’t show up late to everything.
Carry a logbook with you.
If you want to be a plant manager get the corporate guys to notice you.
Get a reputation as a person who gets things done.
Once you set your sights on a job don’t be discouraged when you screw up.
If you want a management position learn to speak English.
Learn about the culture of your corporate people.
Find out what projects that your boss wants to accomplish but hasn’t been able to get anyone to do them.
Don’t get stressed out. (Include the stress histogram here)