One of the more humbling, and formative, experiences in a process engineer's career is to describe in detail how some aspect of a process or piece of equipment operates - only to have a seasoned operator respond, "That's all well and good, but let me tell you what really happens on a Sunday at 3:00 a.m." The young engineer learns then that operators can provide a valuable source of process knowledge and expertise that complements books, computer models, and theory.
Organizations often have a similar opportunity to tap more deeply into the knowledge and expertise of workers. Operators and maintenance personnel may have a deeper and more authentic understanding of a particular problem, and its solution, than does the engineer. The engineer may have a more profound understanding of potential safety and business risks of a certain course of action than does the facility manager. The contract maintenance employee who happens to notice a sound or a smell that is different from what it was on the first two days on the job may, on that third day, have a more important role to play in the safety of the facility man any 30-year veteran company employee.
6.6 MANAGEMENT REVIEW
The overall design and conduct of management reviews is described in Chapter 22. However, many specific questions/discussion topics exist that management may want to check periodically to ensure that the management system for the workforce involvement element is working properly. In particular, management must first seek to understand whether the system being reviewed is producing the desired results. If the organization's level of workforce involvement is less than satisfactory, or it is not improving as a result of management system changes, then management should identify possible corrective actions and pursue them. Possibly, the organization is not working on the correct activities, or the organization is not doing the necessary activities well. Even if the results are satisfactory, management reviews can help determine if resources are being used wisely: are there tasks that could be done more efficiently or tasks that should not be done at all? Management can combine metrics listed in the previous section with personal observations, direct questioning, audit results, and feedback on various topics to help answer such questions.
