Podcast: The warning signs of a broken reliability culture and how plant leaders can fix it

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. In this episode, Joe discusses leadership habits that strengthen maintenance and reliability.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

AT: I hope our listeners know the deal by now, but I ask you questions about leadership, maintenance, reliability, or commonplace issues—anything I can really think of that people deal with in manufacturing facilities. And Joe is the one you're really here to listen to. He gives us his expert opinion. We do like to talk about controversial topics sometimes, so to speak, and things that everyone might not agree on, or things that manufacturing leaders maybe don't want to hear.

So Joe, today's question gets at something that doesn't always show up on a KPI dashboard, but absolutely shows up in performance over time. What behaviors or practices—or maybe lack thereof—destroy a maintenance culture when you walk out in a plant? What are the red flags that tell you this culture is broken?

JK: Great. Let me split that up into the two questions you asked. What behaviors destroy a culture? There are some big ones and there are some small ones.

The big ones are, I've got a couple of them on my mind. One is unplanned work, emergency work. This consumes an organization like a cancer, and you’ve got to figure out how to handle it. You come into work, you've got all these plans that you want to get done, planned work, you've got parts, you've got everything ready to go, some equipment breaks, and all of a sudden you drop everything, and it's the emergency of the day.

And you’ve got to figure out how you're going to handle emergencies. Some emergencies need to be fixed in the moment; some can be pushed out eight hours, 24 hours, 48 hours. But it's very common for production just to say, "Hey, this is broken. Fix it right now. Put all your resources on it." And what gets pushed out is the planned work. It's the number one thing that I've seen destroy your efforts to put in best practices.

The second thing is cost-cutting. It's when things may be going well, and then maintenance gets some direction from above that says you need to cut your costs this quarter, cut $500,000 out of your budget, or cut 10% from wherever you were going to be for the next quarter. Cut 10%, 15%, 20%—not focused on waste. This is stopping the PdM, stopping work on broken equipment, stopping lubrication. This is all the crazy stuff. ‘Hey, let's just cancel overtime. Cancel all overtime,’ regardless of the situation.

That is not a reliability culture. That's a cost-cutting culture.

Those are number one and number two. The third thing I'll say is active and consistent sponsorship by operations and maintenance. Yes, maintenance, but operations leadership and the plant manager—are they consistently talking about the planned work we're doing, the lubrication we're doing, the problem-solving we're doing, the successes that we're having? ‘This outage is important. We're going to have it, even though we're behind schedule. We're going to take that outage because it's important.’

That’s consistent sponsorship. This is not an email. It's not an email. This is active talking on the floor and in your meetings.

The next one—this is related, but I think it's important to separate it out—is management consistently, and this is my term, connecting the dots on what actions we're taking.

So, for example, say we were driving toward 100% lube compliance. Every single lubrication PM we're going to do for the next three months is going to take top priority. Well, management has to connect the dots. ‘Hey, we did that, and here's how many fewer pump failures we had. Here's how many fewer gearbox failures we had, or motor failures, whatever it happens to be.’

And here's why you have to connect the dots: if you don't have a failure, nobody knows about it. Nobody knows about the failures you're not having. So management has to keep telling people the scoreboard. What's going on? What are we seeing at a macro level?

The next thing I'll put in is a culture of accountability. Hey, if you said you were going to do a shaft alignment, did you do it? ‘You said you were going to have an outage on Wednesday for eight hours—did you have it, or was there an excuse?’ Was there an excuse? There's always an excuse to do the wrong thing. It's very easy.

The last thing I'll say is—I debated saying this first, but it just came up last—not having a go-and-see culture. People managed by KPIs in a conference room—it's catastrophic to a reliability effort.

You really have to go out and see the failures. You have to see and audit people doing PMs. You have to audit and see the precision work that people are doing. It's not that they're trying to do poor work. Are they rushed? Is that normally an eight-hour outage that you said they only have four hours for, and so they don't do the shaft alignment right?

Those are the big ones. And one thing I want to note right here is these are all management. These have nothing to do with the people.

So often, I walk into a plant, and management has judgments about the craftsmen—their lack of skill, their lack of work ethic. Maybe it's a union environment and they're having some struggles. But the big behaviors that destroy reliability culture are all management: not handling emergency work right, cost-cutting, lack of consistent sponsorship, not connecting the dots between the actions we're taking and the results, not driving accountability, and not being a go-and-see culture by the staff and management. It's all management.

So there you go. That's how you kill your reliability culture. Look in the mirror. It's all about you. There you go.

AT: What about any other red flags? You were talking about things that were missing. Are there things that you can see out there on the floor that stick out as red flags?

JK: Yeah, absolutely. That's part two of the question you asked. The first thing I notice—and these are comical things. I've been in like 42 plants now, and the first one is when my host, who is walking me around, tells me, ‘Today is an unusual day. This is an unusual day. It's normally not this chaotic.’

I always walk into plants when it's crazy. I always walk into plants on their worst day. So when I hear the host tell me that because of something I see or something we're doing, he goes, "Hey, this is an unusual day." Okay, that's a red flag. Every day has a special event happening.

Another thing is when I'm the only staff person out on the shop floor. When I go on the shop floor, if I don't run into planners, engineers, technical assistants, safety people—you don't have a culture of go-and-see, if I'm the only one on the shop floor.

I've actually done this test before. I've gone to a plant, and I'd walk around for eight hours, and I would say, "I saw three staff people out here in eight hours." And that's where the waste is. That's where the problems are: on the shop floor. They're not in a conference room by a KPI. So those are a couple things I see.

Another thing is housekeeping. If you walk into a maintenance shop and all the equipment is thrown on the floor, trash cans are overflowing—this isn't about cleaning up. This is about people being so pressured and pushed to get the emergency work done that they throw equipment on the ground, throw rags on the ground, and throw tools on the ground. So you can see there's a culture of chaos, instead of a culture of planning.

Another thing is tradespeople standing around. If I walk out to a job and there are five people assigned to the job, and one person is working—or zero people are working—and everybody's scratching their heads, did you plan that job? Most likely not. Why are there five people? Why aren't there two? And there's usually never a good reason for that.

Another one, I had a plant manager. These are real stories. A plant manager said, ‘Joe, I need help. All my maintenance workers do is drive around on scooters. They're just joyriding.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’

I went out there and observed, and I talked to them, and I observed, and I was out there a few days. Then I came back to this guy—his name was Hank—and I said, ‘Hank, do you know what they're doing? They're looking for parts. They're looking for tools. Those jobs aren't planned.’

What do you expect? If you tell them to change out a pump and they don't have the pump, they don't have the gasket material, they don't have a new coupling, they don't know how to lock and tag it out, what do they do? They have to go find those resources and get them. They may have to call somebody in to help. They may even go to the break room because they're waiting for a part to be expedited in from town.

Let's see. Production equipment not running—that's another telltale sign. If it's supposed to be running and it's not running, the hair on my head sticks up saying, "Something's going on here." If the equipment's not running, that's a sign.

Another big one for me—and this is a pet peeve—is I believe, and it's been wildly successful for me when I go into a plant, that operations leads reliability. Operations leads the maintenance planning meeting.

And I will go into a maintenance planning meeting at a plant, and there won't be a single operations person there. That tells me operations is not involved. They care, but it's more of a blaming culture toward maintenance than an ‘I own reliability, it's my equipment, I give up the outage, I prioritize resources’ culture. If maintenance is planning, who attends that meeting?

Another one that I notice, and this goes into the funny category. A lot of people have morning meetings, like a 9 o'clock morning meeting, to see what's going on and let people know the priorities of the day. How did we do yesterday? Any concerns with today?

If I attend that morning meeting, I do a shoe check. I check to see who's wearing street shoes and who's wearing their factory-floor shoes.