Workplace Zombies Don’t Do DMAIC

How to stave off a pandemic of unmotivated workers

A lmost 10 years ago, I started working in a regulated industry, one that follows current good manufacturing practices. I was attracted to its logical and straightforward manner right away. Coming from a background in molecular biology, it made perfect sense for me to build a quality system as a group of subsystems that fits together perfectly.

In a biological organism, the digestive system extracts nutrients from food, and the circulatory system delivers them to the cells through the blood. In a quality system, the document control system stores the most up-to-date procedures and delivers them to the point of use where product realization takes place. Nature’s biological systems and organizations’ quality systems work to keep the organism, or the organization, alive and healthy.

That is until the undead rise from the grave.

Most zombie movies show dead people walking slowly, moaning a lot, and trying to eat people. It’s never pleasant for the few people who are alive, running from the zombie hoard but never able to get far enough away. One bite from a zombie can turn humans into the newest member of the undead. Certainly a zombie infection is not good for any biological system.

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Comments

Zombies

Great thoughts, Steve! I've seen this phenomenon, and sometimes the only solution seems to get out the "zombie-cannon" and get rid of them!

Shaun of the Dead

In the 2004 British hit comedy (Zom-Rom-Com) "Shaun of the Dead", at the very end of the movie there is a funny scene where zombies were put to work returning supermarket carts into their station. This demonstrates best roles out there for zombies. Great article Steve, love the use of humour! Paul

It all has to start with Management

I work in an organization run by PE's. Within the last five years they adopted "data-driven" management systems. They made a giant leap forward into the early twentieth century by adopting time-motion analysis as their model. Now here's where we enter the realm of the surreal. This is of course a gov't. agency. We do a lot of field work. Well, engineers, being engineers, concluded that anyone they can't see working, probably was not working. So all the field people needed to file a detailed electronic daily report to "prove" that they were doing what they were supposed to be doing. Being a cheap state, we don't have laptops to do this from the field and besides we need data to demonstrate that laptops would make our work more efficient. So everyone has to drive from their field assignment to an office every day to file their reports. My employees spend something on the order of an hour a day documenting that they were at work each day. Meanwhile, our team suggested to management that we should track our "product error rate." That way we could focus resources on those projects that had actual issues and just do routine checks on projects with no issues. We got blank stares. All the data in the world is useless if the leaders can't tell the wheat from the chaff; and, it's awfully hard to advise folks who can't tell the buttered side from the dry.

Don't blame the zombies

Blame management. I love the expression "If you have 'dead wood' in your organization, didn't you hire live trees?"