I am sure that the Squeeze-Down Management Method is not being used solely here at Big Brown, but it has been in full effect recently. It is always in use, but really seems to be working to its fullest potential right now.

It has been a while since I have posted any new stories here at The Brown Chronicles, but recent events have inspired me to begin again, spinning the bizarre, but true, tales of working for Big Brown.

Beginning the week of Thanksgiving, we move into our “Peak Season” here at Big Brown. The wonderful time of year where the volume increases because of all the holiday gifts, wreaths, hams, and fruit baskets being sent to loved-ones around the world. As the volume increases, so does the pressure imbued on managers and supervisors from higher up the management food chain. We are not sure how far up the chain of command it really starts to show, but it surely starts at the top with Chairman and CEO Mike Eskew and flows down until it reaches my part-time supervisor.

The reason I believe that it starts way up the management hierarchy, is because for every new part-time supervisor, building manager, district manager, etc., there is no real change is how things run in my building or work area. Pretty much the same things continue to happen, no matter who is in charge near the bottom. So, the pressures coming from higher up seems to be a major component of this methods effectiveness.

Let me explain by going just a few rungs up the management ladder, since over the last couple of days we have had four levels of management roaming my work area. I have a part-time supervisor, over him is a fulltime supervisor, above him is a fulltime Hub Sort Manager and then there is his boss.

The whole place is built on numbers. The better your numbers, the bigger your bonus and when I say “your,” I mean management. Due to things like the Spiral Down Conic Training Method, we have some of the worst numbers and they are always trying to get better ones. But how, you ask? Well, by putting the squeeze on the manager below you to fix things or, pretty much, be out of a job. So, then, in this scenario, the Hub Sort Manager squeezes the fulltime supervisor, who in turn, squeezes the part-time supervisor, who in turn, has no one to squeeze. Well, they try to squeeze the new hires, which is one reasons we have such high turnover, but that is a story for another time. So, basically, they run around looking like their head is about to explode and doing things they shouldn’t be doing, in an effort to relieve the pressure foist upon them, which, unfortunately, only serves to make the problem worse most of the time.

What upper-management doesn’t do, is spend time training their supervisors to be better equipped to run their area, manage their people, or anything else that would be helpful.

Instead, they “yell” at them, tell them they need to do this and that and get this number down and that number up, but no help in how to best do that. Now, the season of higher package volumes is upon us and it only exacerbates the problems.

The Squeeze-Down Management Method has each level of management putting the squeeze on the manager or supervisor below them, like Homer Simpson with his hands around Bart’s neck after a smart-ass remark, until all the pressure is on the lowly part-time supervisor.

I started writing this yesterday before I left for work last night and then at work, I think my supervisor’s head may have finally exploded. Towards the end of the night, at some point, he walked out. I guess he told his bosses that he wasn’t feeling well and then left, but he seemed fine every time I dealt with him during the night. I think he was just covering himself by saying he was sick. I have a feeling he will not be around much longer. While this is not the desired effect of the Squeeze-Down Management Method, it is the inevitable result.

How does your company use the Squeeze-Down Management Method?

At Big Brown, the training regimen for a new hire goes something like this:

• They begin a week with classroom training.
• Later in the week, they get out into the operation for half the night.
• On Friday, they are assigned their new work area.
• Starting on that Friday and for the next week or so, they usually have a training supervisor working with them.

The last one being the stage we are at with our latest new employee.

Big Brown has a training manual that they go through with each new employee. Page by page asking the employee questions, observing them and letting them know what they need to work on and improve and what they are doing well. It is designed to put both a timetable and a structure to what a new employee is to know and a process by which to measure it.

This is all a good idea. Yet, when would you think is the best time to go over this manual with the employee? Would it be…

1. At the end of the night when things are being wrapped up?
2. At a slow period during the night?
3. At the beginning of the shift before things really get started?
4. Right in the middle of the work while the trailer the new employee is working in is getting a significant amount of volume? When the trailer is backed up and the pickoffs can no longer send boxes down the chute because it is full. This leaving many a package having to be rehandled through the system and leading to extra work, a higher possibility of packages being damaged or being misloaded.

If you answered “D” then you could be a supervisor at Big Brown because that is exactly what happened last night.

We were getting a lot of Florida volume down our belt and the pickoffs had no place to put it because the chute was backed up and full and not moving very much. So they are sending them down the conveyor. The pickoff down the line is putting them down a chute for missorted volume. This volume gets rerun through the system after somebody loads it on a cart and then takes it and puts it on the return belt, which sends it back to the front-end to be resorted.

After the third cart of this, in a very short period of time, and hearing the pickoffs yell that Florida is blowing by for the umpteenth time, I headed over to find out what was going on. As I peered into the trailer, there he was, some new supervisor standing there with the new employee manual questioning and talking with the new hire. This, of course, is making him dual-focused and slowing him down at a time when he needs to be focused on the work at hand, not conversing with a supervisor.

When I asked the supervisor, a new one I had not seen before, if he could do this at a later time, say when we weren’t blowing by packages, he just looked at me and didn’t say anything. When I mentioned to him that this might not be a great use of everybody’s time he just looked dumbfounded and had no idea what to do.

It was great, however, that another new employee of about three weeks now chimed in with his assertion that they were going along pretty well and that they would normally be chatting amongst themselves anyway, so it wasn’t really a big deal, but that is a topic for another day. I left and the supervisor just continued with what he had been told to do, which I am sure was to go find such and such new employee and go over this with him. Yet he had no ability to see that it might be better to do it a little later, a perfect product of the Spiral Down Conic Training Method.

So I had to go and find our line supervisor and ask him if he would do something about it. He finally did and the supervisor stopped and came back to talk to the new employee a bit later when things calmed down, which is when he should have done it in the first place.

This is classic Big Brown management. They try to kill two birds with one stone, but end up with a whole flock of other problems as a result. This was not the first nor, I am sure, the last time I will be asking myself, “What the flock is going on here?”

Do you work at a place where management is always running around trying to put out the latest fire? Does your workplace need to work on fire prevention? Do you have managers that spend all their time being reactive and not enough being proactive? You know, doing the little things that make things run a bit smoother. Supervisors that come up with strategies and procedures that solve problems before they arise or at least before they happen again and again. At Big Brown most supervisors tend to be like Drew Barrymore in Firestarter, except while she started fires with her mind, our supervisors tend to start them by not using theirs at all.

At Big Brown, roughly the same thing happens every night. We unload packages from trailers. We sort them and send them via a conveyor belt system to be loaded into other trailers. I work on a load line, one of five areas in my building where we load trailers with packages to make the next leg of their journey. We pull the packages off the belt and send them into the trailers to be loaded. This happens five days a week, every week, every year, year after year.

The volume of packages down the conveyor comes roughly the same everyday. The same trailers get their volume at about the same time everyday. Yet the supervisors can’t seem to have enough loaders in the right places, at the right times, to load these packages. This gets the trailer backed up. This makes it hard to get all the boxes and such into the trailer they are supposed to go into. Which means these packages have to be handled and re-handled multiple times before they can get loaded and sent on their way.

When the same trailers get hit with volume at roughly the same time each night and there isn’t anyone there to load them, something is wrong. Yet this happens nightly. Once the trailer is backed up and problems are starting to arise, then the supervisors send people in to try and clean up the mess. Like a bunch of firefighters sent in to put out a wildfire. Yet we all know there are prevention strategies to be followed that limit the risk of forest fires along with limiting the damage if one should get sparked.

For example: We have a trailer on our line for packages heading to Canada. This trailer tends to get a lot of volume right off the bat. Yet many times there isn’t even a trailer, let alone someone to load it. So we end up pulling these boxes out of other trailers and getting off to a bad start almost nightly because there is no place to put them or no one to load them or both. This creates the greater possibility of packages ending up in the wrong trailer, being sent to the wrong destination and delaying delivery. Also, the more a package gets handled, the greater the chance of its being damaged. What would you do in this situation? It seems quite obvious to me.

As with many workplaces, what is needed is a proactive mentality to be instilled in the workforce, especially those who are in charge of the operation. What we need is more Smokey Bears and a lot fewer mindless Drew Barrymores.

It is like a bad pyramid scheme. You sell to two people and they sell to two people and so on and so on, all benefiting the person at the top the most, usually.

The first job a new supervisor gets here at Big Brown is as a trainer of new hires. Sooner or later, usually sooner, one of those newbies becomes a supervisor and they start training the next batch of new hires. Then one of those becomes a supervisor and begins training more new hires. It all looks and sounds pretty good until you look at it a little closer. When you do, you will notice that the problem is the direction the quality of the training takes and the amount of training that actually occurs using this method.

For example: Supervisor A takes his knowledge and trains a group of new hires. They end up knowing less than he does because he either doesn’t tell them everything they need to know or he doesn’t know how to convey what it is they need to know. This can be compounded when you get a supervisor that doesn’t know what to teach or how to teach it.

Then one of his trainees becomes Supervisor B and once again becomes a trainer. He trains a bunch of new hires, all of which end up with less know-how than he does, which is less than Supervisor A. Then one of his trainees becomes Supervisor C. His trainees end up knowing less than he does, which is less than Supervisor B, which is less than Supervisor A and so on and so on. At each level of the pyramid, the training gets weaker and weaker contributing to the downward direction in the quality of each worker when using this training method.

Like I said, usually this benefits the person at the top of this type of scheme. In this setting, the person at the top is the Company or more directly the Shift Manager. He is definitely not benefiting from this. Having a less and less capable staff over time is not in any way in the management’s best interest.

Yet the shift manager does the hiring of the supervisors who do the training of the new hires of which some become supervisors, which are hired by the shift manager. This is all very circular and the part that makes up the spiraling nature of this method of training.

As you spiral down, the amount of training diminishes. This results in a smaller trip around the spiral at each level. Think of it as an ice cream cone with the big end on top and the small end on the bottom. At each level down the spiral, the amount of training know-how being imparted to new hires is less and less. This gives a conic shape to the downward spiral of this training method.

This is the process of Spiral Down Conic Training. We proudly use this method of training new people here at Big Brown.

Other names you may know this method of training by are:

• The Tidy Bowl Training Method – It may look clean, but after the swirling stops, you have effectively flushed your training quality down the toilet.
• The Training Tornado Method – It is fast moving but leaves an unpredictable path of destruction in its wake.

Does your building or company use the Spiral Down Conic Training Method?