Carrying a Heavy Weight on My Shoulders

When you are in the heat of battle, you don’t realize the toll it’s taking on your health. I was the business unit manager for a vinyl flooring operation for Armstrong World Industries for two years. During that time, we were in a continual state of downsizing. This didn’t help the relationship with our union. It seemed like everything we tried to do to improve safety, cost, quality, or customer service was met with resistance.

Because our business was shrinking, we were under constant pressure to reduce costs. It wasn’t unusual for upper management to threaten your job or to be told if you couldn’t get it done, someone else would be happy to take your place.

I decided the best course of action was to open a dialogue with our shop steward, lay out the situation, and work together to make the best decisions for our employees. For the first few months, he spoke with me, but little changed in our relationship. I was as transparent with him as possible, explaining the business environment and the reasons for the changes we were making. He didn’t trust me. Apparently, prior managers had burned him a few times and he wasn’t willing to forgive and forget what had happened.

We got to a point where traditional operating schedules weren’t practical for the amount of production we were required to make. We needed to make sure everyone had equal opportunity to work full-time, but providing a 40-hour workweek required us to rotate some of our established crews and revise our overtime policies.

I knew I couldn’t do this on my own. It was going to be complicated and if anyone made errors in assigning overtime, we’d be open to employee grievances and back pay. We couldn’t afford that. I called a meeting with the shop steward and my staff. I laid out the situation and my desire to be equitable for all remaining employees (we had to lay off some of our employees, which didn’t improve people’s moods).

In the past, when everyone worked a traditional schedule, overtime was offered by seniority. If the most senior employee didn’t want overtime, the next most-senior employee was offered the opportunity. This continued until someone accepted the overtime assignment. In our new schedule, it wasn’t going to be obvious who should be offered the overtime.

The group argued for a while, and I realized it would be too easy to make a mistake offering overtime unless we came up with a set of rules we all agreed to. I said I’d take a crack at it, and we could meet again to review my efforts.

After much deliberation and advice from others, I developed a table showing the various schedules and twelve situations where overtime might be required. The idea was to check each situation in order and once you found the correct situation, it told you how to assign overtime.

It was complicated, but the team only found a few flaws that would leave us open to grievances. Once corrected, everyone agreed that if we followed it, it would be a fair approach to assigning overtime. Besides, it was so complicated most people wouldn’t understand it well enough to file grievances.

Once our shop steward saw I was fully including him in our processes and wasn’t trying to take advantage of anyone, our relationship changed. Not outwardly to the rest of the employees, as he still had to play the role of “management buster.” But we collaborated often on critical issues.

Five days after I transferred back to a corporate role, I was cutting my lawn. My neighbor came over and stopped me to say, “You look different.” I never realized that all the stress of my job was easily seen by everyone but me.