Podcast: Year-end maintenance lessons and keeping crews engaged, safe, and production-ready during the holidays

Reflection, I personally look at the December time period as a time of reflection. What goals did we set? What did we accomplish? And most importantly, what did we learn during the year? What did we learn? We sat out on January 1 with all these objectives and all this, feeling good and hope, and how did that turn out? Did we pick the wrong actions? Did we pick the wrong goals? Reflection is so important to me, and it's part of how I'm made. I do that all the time, but this is a natural time to reflect, particularly like I said on lessons learned, so I try to share that with my leadership team, get in some discussions with them, discussions with the crew. Be interactive, not just lecturing them on the lessons. But what did you learn this year? What did you learn? What could we do better? And I love this time of year. And like you said, you're balancing celebration, reflection, and planning ahead, because you need to start January 1 running forward, or you're going to have problems so it's all three. I can't say that it was a big problem keeping things running this time of year.

The biggest problem that I had toward the end of the year was the workforce being a little distracted, and that could turn into safety incidents. That's probably number one for me. But as far as making sure that we were doing the maintenance and doing it with precision and doing the problem solving, that really wasn't a big problem, but safety was one that always took a tick up this time of year, really because distractions that people have, sometimes people not feeling good about the holidays. They're reflecting on loved ones that may have passed, things like that. So that's where that manifested itself, in my plants, was in the safety arena.

PS: That's interesting. I hadn’t really thought about the safety angle. Do you have any advice in terms of dealing with the morale issue at that time of the year? I mean, when it is about celebrating and being with family and your plan is running 365 days a year, 24/7. Maybe, let's talk about the ways that you kept morale up. Was it planning in terms of scheduling and making sure that, you work this holiday so you get this one off. What are some of the practices for getting through all that?

JK: Yeah, great question, and the thing that I would say is, it's time for the leadership to be on the shop floor. What we did, and you reminded me of this, is on weekends, typically there's less management people there. Maybe you have a frontline supervisor there, but Saturday and Sunday, you go with that very skeleton crew from a leadership standpoint. And we would divide up time where somebody would come in. I own Saturday. Somebody else would own Sunday, and I would make a couple appearances at the plant, maybe at six o'clock in the morning, maybe then at six o'clock in the evening, and that would be on the shop floor time. That's not time going in the office to do emails or to have a meeting, or do anything like that. It's time to be out there with the crews, thanking them for the year, reflecting on the year. 
 
It's time to hit the streets with the one-on-one messages. And there's no substitute for this. To me, big crew meetings are nice, but they're not a substitute for a one-on-one meeting with somebody or a small group. Maybe you come up on three mechanics doing a job, and you can talk to them, and you give them, five, seven minutes to talk about what they're doing and why it's important. And hey, we had a good year. And hey, did you enjoy that meal we had last week. The leadership needs to be present. And we did that across the holidays, where it wasn't normal practice, but in from November into really Thanksgiving through January 1, we made sure some leader, in addition to the crew leader, was out there every single day. And that to me was priceless for us.

PS: Okay, that's good advice. The holidays are traditionally about celebration, I love the meals idea. I think that's great. And I think it just does mean a lot to people. Christmas cookies are how I show love at Christmas. So I would just have plates of Christmas cookies everywhere for everyone, but any other ways that you guys celebrated during the year, even in terms of looking back at things that you did well, is it just about voicing those things that you did well and celebrating it as a group, or anything else you would add to in terms of celebration?

JK: Well, one other thing that we did, and we happen to have a communications manager at every plant that I worked at, and we really tried to get some stories out there on some successes through the year. Maybe, we've achieved PM compliance of 90% and gave some stories there, maybe took a picture of a maintenance crew or something like that. Just really trying to give them more public recognition as well. So yes, the end of the year is a time to reflect. It's time to celebrate, but it's also time to plan. I can't say I prioritized one over the other, but most of the year we're on execution, and this is a special time to say, hey, let's, spend a moment think about how we're going to celebrate and how we're going to reflect, because we're always planning. We're planning and executing 11 months of the year. December is a great month to reflect, and I like getting that message out to people one on one. It takes much more time, but the impact is 1000 times, definitely.

PS: And just to reiterate on the safety issue again, I think that was important thing that you pointed out, and something I hadn't really thought about in terms of the way that a holiday might affect the way that people are working. Yeah, absolutely. 
 
All right, so for the second part of our podcast this month, we're going to stay with the holiday theme here and hopefully have a little fun I hope. I started thinking about Santa's workshop, and it is really the ultimate factory. It's running 24/7, super high output, lots of moving parts, zero tolerance for downtime, especially, during the holiday season. So I'm imagining the production metrics at the North Pole factory must be out of this world. They're always on time, perfect quality, no recalls. Santa's awesome. The elves are doing a great job. So that is some amazing reliability. Joe, how do you think Santa keeps the elves motivated year-round? And what kind of secret reliability culture do they have for such consistent performance?

JK: Well, it's got to be a happy atmosphere, because of all the shows I see on Santa's workshop. They're singing, so something must be going right. I don't know if they're paid a lot, but they do have job security. I would say, as I look at, if I was as a maintenance advisor, if I was a reliability advisor sent into Santa's workshop, most likely, I would see a lot of system redundancy. And what I mean by that is, if they need, one pump or two, let's say two pumps to operate this hydraulic press, which made dolls, they probably have four, so you can do maintenance and rebuilds on one of them without impacting production. That's typically what you see in plants that have ultra-high efficiency, ultra-high uptime quality, is they have a lot of redundancy in, and costs can be a challenge in plants like that. 
 
Second to that, I would say, man, they've got to have exceptional predictive work going on in that facility. They know about problems before they are problems. In that culture of problem solving that I've often talked about is you see something very early on the failure curve, so it's just starting to make a little noise, or you sense it on vibration or heat or ultrasonics, and you see it early where you can fix it, maybe during a parts changeover. You're moving from one toy to the next toy. Or you can switch over to a secondary pump, where the primary pump, you can take it offline. That's usually what I see. If somebody says that 100% reliable, 100% uptime, I'm a little cautious of that, what does that mean? Does that mean you have so much redundancy everywhere that you never have a problem? Usually, there's a cost impact to that, but motivating the elves, they must be well paid, happy and good treats. That's probably part of that.

PS: Right, Mrs. Claus must be baking them some good stuff. They obviously have a great maintenance and reliability team making production look so good there. They're maintaining a fleet, Santa's sleigh and all the reindeer. They've got to have conveyor lines for toy assembly. I imagine in December, even their PMs are, are slipping to January, a little bit as production takes a step forward. But they're doing something right. I even imagine, power reliability would be an issue at a remote location like the North, not to mention how temperature would affect things like pneumatic systems, or their HVAC system overall. So it's pretty amazing factory that they have running there. They're doing something right.

JK: Yeah, you really have to know your equipment extremely well and how it's going to fail. And there are some production components that will never fail, but you know when it'll fail and what the signs are, way ahead of time, so you can plan in some intervention. But predictive maintenance is a big one. Getting your toys out there, your vibration, and your equipment out there, your oil sampling. You’ve got to be good at that to have those kind of numbers.

PS: And I’ve got to imagine, Santa has his head elf out there observing everything, and going to his plant floor and working with the elves and checking it out for himself, and going to see what's going on on Santa's workshop.

JK: It all starts with being out on the shop floor and listening to the people, listening to the process. If you're not doing those things, you're going to struggle. If you're in the office just looking at KPIs, there's no way you get to that level of performance.

PS: Alright, Joe, well, thanks for playing along. I appreciate it. That will do it for our special Christmas episode. And that's all for 2025. Thanks to our listeners for listening all year. Again, this is Ask a Plant Manager, a special series presentation of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast. Thank you again to our listeners. We hope you have a great holiday, and until next year, we'll see you next question.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

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