The economic loss created by fear in the workplace is immeasurable. Employees who labour within a command-and-control management hierarchy are frequently motivated by threat and coercion. Not only does fear destroy any sense of team spirit and pride, but it also shuts down important communication channels, inhibiting the flow of creative, constructive, and corrective ideas upstream.  

Just how might the front-line employee fall victim to fear at the workplace? In the 1992 classic movie Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin masterfully portrays the character Blake, who motivates a small real estate sales staff through fear and intimidation. The results of Blake’s sales contest, where salesmen placing below second place get fired, are tragic. Indeed, failure is guaranteed and engineered into the process. The characters endure humiliation, desperation, deceit, theft, and scandal as they grasp at dignity and struggle to salvage their jobs, by any means necessary.

Workplace fear and intimidation might not play out as dramatically as it did in Glengarry Glen Ross. Nevertheless, it is real and equally menacing. The weapons of fear include threats, harassment, exclusion, and unattainable goals. The fearful employee worries that he will lose his job, be demoted, be denied salary increases, be assigned menial tasks, or otherwise be constructively dismissed. Working in a constant backdrop of a fearful environment, the employee may become withdrawn, vengeful, depressed, abusive, or even violent.

Quality Management guru, the late Dr. W. Edwards Deming, included “Drive Out Fear” as one of his famous “Fourteen Points” for achieving total quality in business. Deming was concerned mostly about the kind of fear that prevents the average worker from finding out how to do the job correctly. He worried about the fear that prevents employees from asking questions, from rocking the boat, from suggesting new ideas, and from challenging the status quo. "Fear takes a horrible toll,” said Dr. Deming. “Fear is all around, robbing people of their pride, hurting them, and denying them a chance to contribute to the company."

In the 1960’s, Douglas McGregor of MIT’s Sloan School of Management developed what came to be known as “Theory X” of organizational behaviour. The Theory X manager has little respect for employees. He considers them to be lazy, work-averse, and motivated only by self-interest. He feels threatened by the employee who asks too many questions. As such, the Theory X manager institutes a system of close supervision and tight controls, bolstered by a culture of blame. Within this punitive environment, employees learn to mistrust management. They keep quiet. Such a tyrannical manager may be successful in the short term, but fails dismally in the long haul, leaving behind him a trail of destruction and shattered lives. McGregor found that this approach is a major cause of diseconomies of scale in large businesses, and proved it to be counter-effective.

Valuable employees may simply leave the toxic workplace. This is terribly costly to any enterprise. Human Resources expert Susan M. Heathfield of Michigan State University offers advice in her “Top Ten Ways to Retain Your Great Employees”. Gathering data from exit interviews, Heathfield proposes antidotes. She has concludes that in order to retain great employees, firms should:

• Ensure employees know clearly what is expected of them every day.
• Provide high quality of supervision.
• Ensure that employees feel that they may speak their minds freely within the organization, without fear of recrimination.
• Utilize employees’ talents and skills.
• Promote fairness and equitable treatment.
• Provide opportunities for staff to grow in career, knowledge, and skill
• Never allow employees to feel anonymous or alone.
• Never threaten a person’s job or income.
• Encourage reward, recognition, and appreciation.       

The enlightened manager encourages participation and input. She fosters an environment of learning and interaction. She is self-confident, but not narcissistic. She puts the welfare of the company ahead of her personal aspirations. She is a team leader. She treats her staff’s opinions with respect. She entrenches processes that allow suggestions for continuous improvement initiative.  She knows how to answer questions about methods and procedures, or knows how to get the answers. She takes great joy in seeing her employees grow, get promoted, and get raises in pay. She builds enduring teams of people who love their work. She will succeed.

Recently on Linkedin, the following question was asked:

Team, any suggestions on how to error proof the pick / ship process manually or with RF. To ensure the customers always gets what he has ordered.

This was my response this morning, for your interest and amusement:

An appropriate answer depends very much upon the nature of the product(s) being distributed, as well as outbound shipment volumes and frequency. This submission will talk about a process that has a heavy manual component.

I agree that verification of outbound shipments is a very important step.

I used to manage (as Operations Manager) a small (40,000 sq foot) warehouse that stored and distributed finished goods of very high per unit value. The goods were fragile as well. We had a high sku-count (about 7,500 sku's), large customer data base, and our WMS was a combination of manual pick/pack/ship with a bespoke computerized customer service system that generated the picking documents. It was very "1980's", but we succeeded in achieving over 99.5% inventory record accuracy, high labour productivity, and virtually no customer complaints regarding mis-shipped sku's.

One of my warehouse manager's key responsibilities was performing a visual verification of case contents before the cases were sealed and manifested for shipping. Two of our best full-time staff assisted him in this process, when required. He was on the floor a lot (over 75% of his day, typically - no hiding in his office) and he was obsessed with accuracy.

But, inspection does not ensure Total Quality, and Dr. Deming's Point #3 of his Fourteen Points is "Cease Dependence on Mass Inspection." I agree with Dr. Deming wholeheartedly, and even he granted that some exceptions do exist to this rule. In the spirit of Point #3 we succeeded in building quality of processes upsteam. If we had failed to do this, my warehouse manager would have been overwhelmed with mistakes at the verification stage.

I believe that it is important to have a clear and unambiguous product numbering hierarchy. We dealt with all manner of colours, shapes, and sizes. The product's UPC code, or other numerical identifiers, had to describe the item precisely. It was not good enough to describe a product as being "blue". Was it "sky blue" or "turquoise" or "teal" or "royal blue" or "midnight blue"? We had a code for each. Everyone from customer service to order entry to warehouse operative had to understand the importance of the product codes.

Our order entry staff were well-trained, so that errors at this stage were minimal. If an error did occur, we could easily trace it back to the order-entry operative and take corrective action in that area (was it human error? Did the customer make a mistake? Is some re-training required?).

Warehouse picking staff were well-trained and cross-trained in other areas (e.g. packing and shipping). We favoured full-time employees, and literacy (read, write, speak) in English was a prerequisite. We found it difficult to train part-time and temporary employees to a sufficiently high state of knowledge to ensure quality. If any ambiguity existed, the order pickers were unafraid to ask questions.

While we did not embrace a formal cycle counting routine in our warehouse (I very much recommend it, though) we did use some of the corrective actions suggested by cycle counting. We investigated, for example, any instance where a customer order had passed through the order entry predisposition stage onto the warehouse floor, but the picker could not locate any stock. This would trigger a root cause investigation.

So, I suggest that verification in combination with sound upstream processes will lead to success in shipping accuracy.