Haris: Yes, celebrating wrong heroes is fantastic. But you know, it comes from life. Definitely. Because, have you ever heard about a very famous highly rewarded and paid doctor in a primary medicine who is telling you don’t eat this, don’t eat that, exercise more bla bla bla No. But you have heard about a lot of famous surgeons that are highly paid driving Ferrari and everybody adores them. Because good guys save your life when you have one foot in the grave. That’s the wrong philosophy. But that’s too late. I mean, if you are following the primary medicine, you will never meet the other guy. We are translating this into industry completely. So, to touch directly this question: “Even some of my colleagues strongly resist to improvement,” this is “make no waves” philosophy. So, we are fine. We got used to this. Come on, why do you want to change it? Everything is fine. Yes, there are problems. It took us 10 years to learn to organize ourselves how to deal with consequences fast. So, you want to tell me that my skills are now not needed anymore? You want to tell me that I’m obsolete. You want to tell me that I will not be pat on the back next morning when I put everything back to work. Or guy. You’re not my favorite guy, definitely. So, and then you have this this huge generation gap within the teams. You have a problem on one side, guys with a zillion years of experience, they don’t want to change too much, which is one extreme, then you have another extreme, very young guy who really want to be at the computer 18 hours a day. And the truth is somewhere in the middle. So yes, you need to do that. Yes, we need to improve. But unfortunately, you can imagine this this guy standing between all his colleagues shouting out loud, saying let’s get better. Everybody says yes. Yes, go ahead. You get better. And, unfortunately, now we come to the last part: Enthusiasm has limits.
Martin: Yes. And that’s a bit like, you know, amongst all my friends, for example, I do have friends, believe it or not, but let’s say I was the one out exercising. Okay, I know that’s not believable at all. But if I was the only one exercising, I’d soon become despondent because all my mates are out there having beers and partying and whatever else. And yeah, I can understand why this gentleman feels that his enthusiasm has limits, but we have to, kind of maybe, inspire him to go forward and to be the champion that takes the message forward. My advice would be to say, look, actually, when we get things right, there’s a knock-on impact regarding health and safety. There are case studies that show with increasing levels of reactive work, the number of reported injuries increase proportionally and similarly with the decreasing level of reported injuries. That comes from an increasing level of proactive work orders and preventative work orders where there is time to do the job right the first time and the risks are properly understood. So, there’s a health and safety benefit. There’s also, and let’s face it, Greta Thunberg would be 100% behind us on this, there’s an environmental impact. Because unfortunately, I think the environmental aspects or there’s too much focus on emissions, fuel economy, consumption of power, rather than actually looking at it and saying, you know what, if we made these components, and we made them last as long as possible, the emissions we created manufacturing that component would now be spread over a much longer time period. In other words, we would reduce environmental issues at source, i.e., the manufacturing of the machine in the first place. And so consequently, I would say to this gentleman, go and talk to health and safety colleagues, go and talk to your environmental colleagues, bring yourselves together, create a workforce to show improvement. Now, obviously, health and safety and the environment are often legislated on site. So, management will often jump through hoops if they think there’s a legislation issue to be dealt with. Reliability is not yet legislated. Whilst we have standard series like the ISO 55000 Asset Management series, they’re not yet there in place, they’re not there, yet legislating for reliability. But I would say to this gentleman, work with your colleagues from health and safety and the environment, get them on your side, and go out there with a stronger message. And of course, management will always listen, as we said right in the first session, the numbers, the figures, the costings, the return on the investment, because ultimately, every business needs to be seen to be green, and the kind of industries you and I often work in, the hydrocarbons business, that’s got a pretty negative press out there right now, and ethical investors are moving away from that industry, that industry needs to be seen to be doing the right thing. And, therefore, if they can bring all of this together, I think it has a massive impact, not just financially but for all the right reasons.
Haris: Yeah. So, reliability is still a choice. It’s not a must. So, it’s the choice of the company, how much do they want to invest in reliability. And what I see from this last sentence, for our friend, having enthusiasm will limit like all of us, of course, sooner or later, you get frustrated when you get frustrated if you continue your burnout. So, option one is burnout. Option two is give up. That’s never a good idea for organization, it’s never a good idea for the person himself. And number three is to get the right tools, go on the back door, and do it in a different way. Because the guys who don’t support you, they will never adjust to yourself, to you. So, you need to adjust yourself to them. And what I see often with colleagues, is that people, okay, you have certain number of fans, that’s fine people who support you, and they say, let’s do it. This really sounds good; I see myself in this. I see my chance. Then you have the naysayers, people who will say no to everything you do, and they will sabotage all your actions. And then you have a vast majority of the people who just keep silent. They don’t care. You don’t know their opinion. So, what we say in our training is very often and I really do it in a field is: okay, work with your fans, work with your enemies. Ignore the silent people, because the silent people, they don’t have the courage to say anything. If you succeed, they will tell you that they supported you all the way. If you fail, they will say: Aha, I told you so. But the guys who are your enemies, they actually have a courage to say and then you can learn a lot from them. Those are your human relation diagnostic machines. Look what they are saying, hear them and fight with that. Because there must be in every project, when you speak about colleagues, there is always question: What’s in it for me? So, if you have a simple lubrication technician, and you want to completely disturb his routine, you must give him a reason for that. Because if a company earns 10% more, okay, not a bad idea, but what do I get? Well, regularly, normally you get a safe and secure working position which is good enough. But if you tell him that from the grease guy, you will go through the training, you will get educated lubrication technician, so you have a chance in your career to go up, your work will look completely different, your daily routine will now be on a high-tech level instead of, instead of just pumping degrees and that stuff. So, this translation among your colleagues is also critically important, in my opinion.
Martin: Yeah. And I think I feel sorry for this gentleman, because obviously, nobody likes to give up. And I’ve seen in businesses where they’ve been extremely proactive that the workforce is very happy. The staff turnover is very low, people love the job, they want to stay there, they feel like they’re contributing. And of course, for a business, that means that they are way much more productive than their competitors, half the secret to productivity is a happy workforce. And the fact is, is that, you know, if things are running smoothly, sure people get bored, and you know, but the fact is that it’s much easier to have everybody on side. And the sad reality is, is that this gentleman will probably never drive the message upwards from the channels to senior management, it’s really got to be the lightbulb moment for the senior management to drive it down through the organization, because let’s face it, any manager is only listening to the guy above him, not the guy below. So, consequently, unless the board or the chairman has actually bought into reliability, and, so, you know, our friend has, as you say, two options. One is to try and stay and fight the cause. Or the other is to go and find a job with a company that understands the message and appreciate his ability to help the business.
Haris: I always vote for fighting. Yeah, leaving the battlefield with weapons down, I don’t buy it. So, with the right tools, with the right knowledge with the right advice I am sure this will result in improvement. And by the way, we included this part in our training. So, in our LUBExpert training, the first hour and a half is addressing the management. We’re not talking about friction and anything at all, we don’t discuss it, we discuss why this is important. What will this team be doing? Go support them, give them some air to breathe, and they will bring a lot of money to the company. That’s how it should be. So, I hope we helped to our friend with the certain advice. And if I may say what we discussed today, it’s not exclusively about lubrication, it’s the same thing for any reliability activity. So, it’s the recipe is absolutely the same.
Martin: Yeah, indeed.
Haris: Closing words from your side?
Martin: Keep at it!
Haris: Exactly. Okay. Thank you for this.
Martin: Thank you.
Haris: Talk to you soon.
Martin: Yep. Excellent. Look forward to that. Take care.
Haris: Take care.
