......actually the people in Atlanta are scared to death that we (the hourly) are doing the same thing they (Atlanta) are doing........lying, cheating and stealing.
It isn't that people (hourly or mgmt) are thieves and thugs. 80% of the time I rode with someone I brought the overallowed down, through methods and common sense. 20% of the time I can't. But here's the thing. The standards aren't going to be met each and every day. Things happen. It's up to both mgmt and hourly to identify root causes of this and eliminate as many as possible. Remember. NORMAL effort under NORMAL conditions, following the METHODS. Traffic was backed up 1 hour because of an accident? You won't run scratch. That's not NORMAL (in most places). Usually there's a method problem.
And it's not always that the driver is going "slow" to "screw" the center. Sometimes there really is a time study problem. But those aren't as rampant as people think. And the fact that we average overallowed time is not a sign that the standard is wrong. It's more a sign that of our 90000 drivers, some of them are NOT following the methods every day. There are some characters out there who don't believe in them. Then there's dispatch, that's managements part, and as many drivers don't follow methods, there are sups who don't dispatch according to the way we've prescribed, either. Add all these up and there are a LOT of overallowed drivers out there. Do we just give up and write all this off? Add an hour to everyone's planned time to feel better? No. Without the bar being set at perfect methods, HOW WOULD WE KNOW THERE'S A PROBLEM TO FIX? Most of the frustration our drivers experience is that in some cases the management go about fixing those problems the wrong way. We're not perfect either. But we all should still strive to be.
I think I said this in an earlier post. The package division manager I support has a picture of two junked out vans growing weeds around them in his office. The old timers out there will recognize them as old REA vehicles. At one time, they were a bigger small parcel delivery company than we were, and now they're gone. The legend has it that their drivers could be found chatting up the warehouse and laughing at the UPSer who was so quick to get in and out of there. Here's a dirty secret about them most people don't know...their drivers were EXCEEDING the business plan they had.
I'll give everyone a for instance. I was new in a center, didn't know the area. I was out with a driver to do some safe work methods and learn the route so I knew the area. At about 18:45, we had 30 residential stops left (sound familiar?). Another driver on the adjacent route was finished. I had him meet us at the bottom of a V, imagine there were 2 condo developments at the tops of the V. I told the driver to give the other driver one development while we did the other, so we all get in same time. Driver says ok. They trade stops. We do both developments. We have 4 tires left over(?). As we're coming down one hill, the other driver is coming down the other one. Great.
But WE now proceed up HIS hill, not toward the center. "Why are we going up here?" Answer: "I didn't want to screw him with the tires." Huh? There are now 2 possibilities. 1) He took me for a ride. As I got to know him, I ruled out 1). So 2) is, everyone is working hard, and he truly didn't want to give the tires to his fellow driver. He was working hard, following the methods. So was the other driver. But now we spent 25 minutes on the road more than we needed to. That's where I learned that sometimes I was going to have to be the "bad guy", and some guys weren't going to like it. None of this stuff is in the contract. Was my driver wrong for keeping the tires? No. Next time I upset the other guy by giving him the tires, am I wrong? No, either.
Moreover, the reason the standards aren't the problem is that the business plan we present the analysts does not assume that all of our drivers are going to run scratch every day. That's why the business plan is broken down to elements center by center, and then the center manager breaks down the center to the 2 or 3 supervisor groups, and THOSE groups have to meet a certain performance goal overall, but it's generally not necessary for every driver to make scratch to hit that goal.