Frankenstein Equivalents

Improvements on paper can resemble monsters in the workplace

I was speaking with a friend about a recent downsizing at his church. After nine years, a popular priest had been reassigned to another parish. In an apparent effort to cut costs, a new priest would now split his time between two parishes in neighboring towns.

When I expressed some regret about Father S’s departure, my friend replied, “It’s not so bad. If you look at total staffing, the number of FTE’s hasn’t changed much.”

For the uninitiated, FTE’s or full time equivalents, is a ratio between the total number of paid hours during a period and the number of working hours in that period. The ratio units are FTE units or equivalent employees working full-time. In other words, one FTE is equivalent to one employee working full-time—sort of.

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I'm one of those equivalents

Hi Bruce,

Yes, I know that feeling now for several years. We are a maquiladora in MX that has been working now for twenty years; I’ve been here for seventeen years now but I still can remember when I got here from a previous job that I had for twenty two years in at the automotive industry.

Back seventeen years ago we had 80 workers (including operators and all kind of administrative personnel) but I know this maquiladora started with less than thirty making all kind of activities. Back then there was no need for HR, payroll, buyers, transportation to take finished goods back to USA; everybody was able to fill almost all positions and activities. We started to grow and thanks God we are still growing but our CEO, which it is also the owner, still thinks we all must do several activities like we did back several years ago.

We have more than 7000 part numbers to handle at our warehouse for raw material, more than 1200 vendors, over 900 part numbers of finished goods; we ship our products back to USA but now we have a distribution warehouse in TX for shipping all over the world. We have +300 workers at our assembly lines and about 60 for administrative and that’s fine but the worst thing is that our boss still thinks some of us need to handle several responsibilities from another areas.

He is only focused in cost reduction for manufacturing and maybe that’s why we are doing great with lots of work but at the same time, he is not promoting for new job positions, assign responsibilities as needed and at the end, we end up in not fully completed activities or too late results.

Thanks Bruce, I just wanted to write my thoughts based on your Frankenstein Equivalents article.