Refer to the Managerial Application “An Antidote to Biased Standards: How Workers Develop Their Own Standards at NUMMI”. What were the benefits of worker involvement in setting the standards at NUMMI?
Managerial Application
An Antidote to Biased Standards: How Workers Develop Their Own Standards at NUMMI
The Toyota-General Motors joint venture in Fremont, California, known as New United MotorManufacturing, Inc. (www.nummi.com), has succeeded in allowing employees to set their own work standards. The NUMMI plant was once a General Motors plant notorious for poor quality, low productivity, and morale problems. But workers who were ashamed of their products now leave notes on cars saying, ‘‘I helped build this one.’’ The NUMMI plant has won numerous J. D. Powers and Associates plant quality awards.
At the old GM Fremont plant, industrial engineers who had little, if any, work experience in making cars would shut themselves in a room and ponder how to set standards. The industrial engineers ignored the workers, who in turn ignored the standards. At NUMMI, workers themselves have set the standards. Worker team members have timed one another, looking for the most efficient and safest way to do the work. The workers are more informed about how to do the work right than industrial engineers. They are more motivated to meet the standards they set, instead of those set by industrial engineers working in an ivory tower.
Involving the workers has had benefits in addition to improved motivation and standards. These include improved safety, higher quality, easier job rotation because of easier tasks, and more flexibility because workers are both assembly-line workers and industrial engineers. For example, if orders for the product change, NUMMI can change the speed of the assembly line to respond. At the old GM Fremont plant, the assembly line ran at one speed, and responses to changes in orders came either from inventory or from adding or dropping entire shifts. Source: Authors’ research at NUMMI and the NUMMI Web site.