We talk a lot about equipment and techniques used to assembly PCBs, but wanted to dedicate an episode to focus on the people who are actually getting the work done. In this episode, we talk to Worthington employee, David Mulherin, about how to keep work output high in a high-stress manufacturing environment while also making sure factory workers feel like they are valued.
pickplacepodcast.com
We talk a lot about equipment and techniques used to assembly PCBs, but wanted to dedicate an episode to focus on the people who are actually getting the work done. In this episode, we talk to Worthington employee, David Mulherin, about how to keep work output high in a high-stress manufacturing environment while also making sure factory workers feel like they are valued.
pickplacepodcast.com
Welcome to the pick place podcast, a show where we talk about electronics, manufacturing and everything related to getting the circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denney with Worthington. And this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub Welcome back, Melissa. welcome back, Chris. So, we're going to be releasing this episode a little late. Is this true? Yes, this is true. It is supposed to be released right now. And it is it is whose fault? Not mine. No, it is not your fault. It is my fault. Apologies to the audience for missing the schedule again. That's all right. You're doing something very important. Yes, very important remodeling my house and just completely lost track of time. And didn't not have the opportunity to do the recording. So apologies for being late, but here we are, we're back. We're recording and Melissa will do her magic and edit this and you will be listening to it. Hopefully tomorrow. hopefully, hopefully, hopefully on a Tuesday instead of a Monday, apologies for that. Yep. We do our best here, but we do still have full-time jobs. Do we not? yes, And full-time houses. And full-time houses. Yeah, seriously. but Yeah. kitchens are, are, that's no fun electrical and plumbing and drywall and just venting and just, oh gosh, that is that's on our to-do list that we've been putting off. I recommend. Going to Australia for a month and just hiring somebody to do it. And so you come back to it done. Yeah. no, we're not planning on doing it ourselves. We're not that ambitious. I've already painted the whole, almost the whole house and that's enough for me. That's that's enough for most people, This is not the kitchen remodeling show. This is the pick place podcast show. So what's new besides remodeling kitchens. we are super, super, super excited that we are buying new pick and place machine, which we alluded to. Hm. In a previous episode, I don't know which episode it was. It was a while ago and the efforts that it takes to, to do this evaluation. And, and if you know how long ago we recorded that episode and we still haven't actually ordered the equipment. That's that's how complicated and how long these things take. So we have decided to order from a company called Fuji, probably, the largest pick and place manufacturer in the world. I think they have a significant share of the cell phone market, which is probably what bumps them up quite a bit. Yeah. lot of your, your Foxconns, your J bills, your, you know, your huge flex, your huge CMs buy a lot Fuji equipment. So yeah, a lot of good things there. I think we'll probably have a future episode where we dig in deep as to how a company like us decides on who to choose, but we've made that choice and and it's exciting and I'm, I'm really anxious to get it in here and just see. See the rework go down, see the production go up. And, and honestly, I'm just excited to give people tools that they love to use. yeah, that's true. You know, as an illustration remodeling the house, I was, I was working on putting drywall on the ceiling and if you've ever, if you've ever had to do that, you know, dry wall can be very heavy and then you've got a drill and you've got a screw and you've got to pull the drywall and you've got to push the drill in and it's, it's not easy. Well, you know, my dad's watching me struggle with this. He goes here, I'll give you a gift. I give you a better tool. And he's got this tiny little, like almost pocket-sized drill probably weighs you know, one fifth of the weight of my impact driver. And it was just made everything so much easier. That much less weight just got the job done so much easier, having the right tool for the job. Is just a pleasure. It's just a delight to have the right tool for the job, you know, and I'm excited to get these machines in the hands of our people, which they've been working with 2007 in 2010 generation machines. These are old machines at this point and what they're able to do with those, I just can't even imagine what they're going to be able to do with the new stuff. I'm so excited. That's super cool. Do you have any idea how long it'll take to get them in once you order Realistically I think we will we will probably not see these until June or July okay. That's not, that's not too bad. Really? Right. They're having the exact same issues that everybody's having. Every listener to this show is having the exact same issues chip shortage, right. So they can build the machines. They've got the, the steel mills and the, you know, they're able to get the frames and the covers and the belts and, you know, the heads and everything built physically. But then they might not have a circuit board that controls a motion system or something, or a camera system, or, you know, so they're, they're building these things. And in some cases they're actually shipping the equipment to the customer and installing that final circuit board onsite because otherwise it's like, well, what are we going to do? Shut down our entire assembly line of, of pick a place machines now. So, so it'll be interesting, you know, it's a machine made in Japan, so it has to have. Leave the factory in Japan, get to the port in Japan, get on a ship, cross the Pacific ocean, get to the port and Los Angeles, get on a truck across the United States to our rigor in Connecticut Rigor in Connecticut has to unpack it, get it on their equipment, drive it up, you know, and, and, and that whole thing. So like, say it takes 12 weeks just to leave the factory doors in Japan. Well, it's going to be another four plus weeks from there still, you know, so it's, it's at least four months and I'm, I'm anticipating five to six, so we'll see. But yeah, excited to have a discussion about why we chose them. And to be fair, like it was really close. There was a few other vendors we were interested in. Everybody's making great stuff nowadays. You almost can't go wrong. I mean, you really can't, it's, it's impressive. You, you know, if you've got a good workforce, you will be successful with any of these machines. We just think that this one suited us the best, so excited to excited to get that in. Yeah. that's, that's exciting. And it'll be really nice to have some episodes just about the experience of setting it up, getting people trained on the new machine and all that. That, that will be painful. That that transition period is always painful because you just, like, I used to know how to do this so easily on my old machine. And now I can't figure out how to do it on this machine. You know, there's always just those little things that just drives you crazy at first, but eventually. Five six months down the road, you get comfortable with it all and you're off to the races and you're enjoying the fruits of your new equipment. So very excited. You know, what else is very exciting? What Our guests today, I agree. This is this is a person I've enjoyed working with for a number of years now. Hopefully he can remember how many years, because I can't remember the number of years but we we wanted to have an episode where , we did a lot of talking about how we how we, you know, how we assemble PCBs and what equipment we use and the processes and techniques and stuff. But Melissa, I believe it was your idea to have an episode on the people who are actually getting all this stuff done, Yeah. which is a fantastic idea. And so what we wanted to do was invite somebody who, who was a great asset to send people who we've hired a number of years ago to help us with it's just, I don't know, great background, great information. We'll we'll we'll get into it and learn all about them. Welcome to the show, Mr. David Mulherin. Welcome David. Thank you insert background applause here. Thank you. It's great to be here. That's great to finally have you on, we've been trying to convince you to come on for a while Now Now you're you're a bit of a pick pack pick place podcast celebrity. We've mentioned David on the show a number of times. Yeah. You would know that David, if you listened to the show, while I'm listening, I just saw, you know, I'm listening to another episode today. Oh, awesome. Is it this one? So you're speaking it as you're listed. Yeah. Very good. Perfect. I don't know if that counts. So, so David how long do you, do you know how long you've been here at Worthington? I've been here about six years. years? In some ways it feels like longer in some ways it feels like it, like, you know, it just happened, so it's wild. For, for me it feels like it just happened. so, all right. So why are we having you on the show today? The whole point of, you know, we can do all these fancy things with equipment and process and everything, but at the end of the day, it takes. Do all this work. It's really people that build everything. As, as I've mentioned a couple of times on our show before we had a we had a talk at a conference KiCAD had a conference a while ago, and I reminded the audience, it's people that built this stuff. It's not a bunch of robots in a giant factory it's people that are doing this work. So if you're remember that it's people doing this work you'll be a better designer because you'll understand that there's people looking at your designs, trying to figure out what you're trying to do so that they can build it better for you. And helping those people do a great job is, is a awesome, awesome experience. Something I've learned a lot about since working with David, because David has a really interesting background. I was hoping maybe if you're okay with it, you could share a little bit with us that background where your kind of work history before coming to. Sure. I would say with the exception of three years of retail, I've been in manufacturing my entire adult life. So that would be, that would be probably 30 plus years. I've been Oh boy. Now we know we can figure out how old you are. And you know, the retail was a great start. I started with a company in their retail division and it just I was lucky enough to get a. Get an opportunity to go into the factory from retail. They had a need and I was able to fill it. So, so, Where was the factory? I was in up in Maine. I'm originally from Maine and I was in the shoe industry for many years. But so that's what I've been doing my entire life manufacturing, making shoes, making cotton, making stove, pipe, and now helping people make wonderful circuit boards Whoa. Whoa, whoa, slow down. Making stove, pipe. Yes. Like what do you mean? You mean making stove? Pipe? Manufacturing the stove pipe that you, if you're going to have a pellet stove, you have all of these, all of this piping that has to go from the pellet stove outside of the house. We manufactured that we manufactured stove pipe for double-walled pipe, for wood stoves. Yeah. Very, very interesting process and very precise. Not like the precision that, that that we do here, but still very precise. Yeah, well, sure. No. So would you like buy rolls of steel and form them or did you okay? yes. Yep. Yep. So just imagine that big rolls of steel coming in, the building little pieces of stove, pipe going out, the building. So your supplier for those rolls of steel would be, would be a Foundry. Somebody who's literally going from or to product is your supplier. no. Yeah, Wow. That's awesome. was cool. That's super cool. I love manufacturing in general, but I love the idea of taking raw materials out of the dirt and creating something from it. And like at some point we've got to get somebody on here that like makes resistors or capacitors or something that like, literally mine's the tantalum and turns it into a capacitor. You know, that stuff just fascinates me. All right. So we go from, we go from stove, pipes, and shoes. Now this was all still in Maine. You're saying No, I, throughout the years I've lived I've lived in the Caribbean. I spent 13 years in Puerto Rico manufacturing I spent, I spent seven years in the Dominican Republic, also making shoes only to make my return back to the United States, to Charlotte, North Carolina, to do some, some work in the cotton industry. And then came north back, close to home. I have, I have family up close to here. And so does my wife. So, it just seemed like, it was a great, it was great to come back through the Caribbean, back up to North Carolina, kind of get used to the winters. They don't have a very tough winter. And now back up in Western mass and it's great. We love Western mass. And I, I will say that this job is just, you know, it's just been so much fun. It's keeping us in Western mass for sure. Oh, good. Well, that's good to hear. So, so when you say you were in manufacturing, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, et cetera, like what, what were you doing in those points? Like what brought you to. Puerto Rico, North Carolina, Dominican Republic. Like why, why did you decide to cause that's a pretty significant like going from Maine to, yeah, let's go to the Dominican Republic. yes. Oh, it was, I worked for a family owned business, but it was a large business. It was, you know, probably 3,500 employees. And they, they Had a gentleman retiring out of their facility in Puerto Rico. And he was from he was from Maine also, and they want it to have some presence you know, another Mainer down there. I think that the owner, the owners of the company felt like you know, they were very proud of Maine people and their work ethics and everything like that. So they just they, they needed to fill a position. And I think they asked a dozen people, nobody wanted to go. And finally, they, you know, get far enough down on the list that I was chosen. So, and I went, I went, I went quickly, so, and all right, so then you you come here and you hang out with little old Worthington assembly now. What are the S what were the size of the factories you were working in earlier? They're a little bit different than ours. yes. Our facility in Puerto Rico was 1600 people. And then the plant in the Dominican Republic was about 830 people. Yeah. Okay. A couple more than here. yeah, a couple more than here. And that's a lot of responsibility is try, you know, trying to keep the wheels turning in an 800 employee factory. Must've been a tremendous amount of stress and effort. It was it was completely different than this environment. You know, you were faced with constant turnover, you were faced with you know, you had a large group of supervisors and so everything you did had to go through the supervisors and then it had to get worked out to the floor. Didn't have the dynamics that we have here that, that you know, we've taken that whole that whole level out and just created a group of people that make decisions here. So, it's. that's, it's, it's an adjustment for a lot of people that come in, cause they're not used to that sort of, sort of our environment, but, well, let's, let's, let's ease our way into that conversation because that's sort of, you know, we want to talk about how, how do we keep people engaged and how do we keep people motivated? But specifically, how do we do that in such a stressful environment. Because I think, I think it's probably a misunderstanding of, well, I guess what I'm getting at is if you've never, if you've never worked in manufacturing period, but specifically electronics manufacturing, it might be difficult to understand why this kind of work it starts to look like a commodity process, you know, it's like, oh, I can buy from these guys and I can buy from those guys. And it's just solder joints. What's so complicated about that. But at the end of the day, it's, it's really, there there's so much that goes into it. I don't feel like getting into the details and differentiators between various factories, but what, I'm, what I mean by the fact that it's not a commodity product is, you're not just spitting out rolls of steel, right? You're not just making like this one thing over and over where you just, you understand the process so well and you keep making it over and over in, in small electronics manufacturing, which, which is the majority of electronics manufacturing in the United States anyway. And honestly, probably in most of Europe you know, you're, you're just dealing with an enormous variety of challenges. First of all, every product is different. Like, and not just a little different, like completely different from the next product. Everything is, is, is a custom thing. It's not like you just have, like, you know, you open a catalog from some manufacturer who makes pens or something to see big pen it's coming, coming full circle for people who've listened to that episode. You know, they've, you know, BIC has probably has 40 different pens that they make and they, they know how to make each one of them. And when they go to make them, they change over their line. I don't know, however, you make pens, but they just have a process that they follow to make that thing. Well, each and everything we build every single day is completely different from the past. Right. It's never this never the same thing. Reasonably speaking, I mean, obviously we do repeat orders, but so often it's something completely different. And you just think about the complexity of the materials that go into it. David, how many materials would it take to create a stove pipe? How what's what's the bill of materials to get it stovepipe made, Maybe 18 lines right? Cause you you've got your powder coating. You've got your type of steel. Yeah. You got your die, you gotta push it through I'm sure. You know, a typical bill of materials is anywhere from like 40 to 240 lines for a circuit board. And so you end up dealing with. Okay. So if I need 200 different unique part numbers for this build, I'm probably going to go to over a dozen different vendors to get all those parts, because there's no vendor that carries every single one of those. As much as we love Digi-Key, they don't carry everybody. So you've got to deal with all of that complexity. Many of these parts are very, very expensive, so you release them to the floor and you're like, oh yeah, by the way, that tray of parts you're holding in your hand, there, it costs more than your house. Literally. It can just, it blows the mind to think about that. So imagine, you know, just think about that for a moment. You're, you're holding parts that this customer has paid for and you're being asked, oh yeah. Solder all of those to the circuit board properly each and every single time. Yeah. I know. You've never seen the circuit board before but do it and by the way, if you do it wrong, it's literally more expensive than the roof over your head. How do you not get stressed out thinking about situations like that? You know, there's just so much, and you've got this incredibly complicated machine that takes years and years and years to fully master. And then you've got jerks like me that come downstairs after having a phone conversation that say, yeah, we really need to run this job rather than that job. So stop everything you're doing and do something else. It's it's, it's just, it's a very stressful work environment. Would you agree? I would but I think that one of the, one of the interesting things that we do here is we take as much, I think that we take as much of the common practices that we have in the facility. We kind of standardize things. We kind of identify parts of our process that don't change much. And, and we, we make it so it flows better. So that noise is gone. And then when those little spikes of issues come up, when those little special specialty things come up our people, our teammates, they're able to act on it without the noise of everything else going on. And, and I guess, you know, that's so hard to explain, but simple things, you know, Kanban I was going to say, give an example. know, Kanban tickets, because let's say without a Kanban ticket, you run low on something and now you have to have a conversation with somebody, Hey, I'm almost out of this item. And I use it every day. Who do I need to talk to? Who ordered this last time? Gee, I can't remember. Let me, let me get ahold of somebody. Oh gee. And then before you know, it, you've got three people involved. They can't remember where they bought it. So, so you take a Kanban ticket and all they, all they have to do is simply deposit it into the Kanban reorder location. Now somebody just grabs it. It tells them how many reorder they go into the system. They S the, the, the computer tells them where they bought it from last time. They simply issue a purchase order and, and it's done. So it takes something that required four people before in four conversations. Now nobody's even talking. And it, that is stressful in the real world when people have to take out of their day and waste time on simple things, because all the magic and all the important stuff is happening on the line with the teammates that are making that product. So, so that noise has to go away. Yeah, totally. And it's so true because it's like, just think about like, when you run out of milk. Yeah. Like, oh, who's going to pick up more milk. And if you don't have a process for getting more milk, it's like, well, I thought you were going to get it. I thought you were going to get it. And that just takes the whole pain of it a way. Yeah. That's a perfect example. So we do that in not just combine cards. We do it in EV every area has their, their own set processes and, and, you know, they have their experts. They're the expert of the area. So they are identifying all of that which is very interesting because me, David, I don't spend my day going around trying to identify this stuff. I we, we will do a once a week stand up, meeting in certain areas and talk about ideas. But, but sometimes my only role is just to get people that forum to talk in, and then they end up, you know, the, the teammates are, are, are taking care of all of this stuff. I don't know if that yeah, but it's the teammates, you know, imagine every person, every teammate in here is a piece of expensive Italian tile. And, and then there's some of us in here that are just the grout that just, we just, all we do is we just make sure that all that wonderful tile is even more wonderful because we're keeping it together. And I David I'm just the subflooring. you're, you're the, you're the remodeled kitchen, but no, I mean, and, and, and the ownership group allows us to do that. And they're part of the grout themselves. So I would consider myself more, a piece of grout than a piece of a nice tile. But I, so if that can be my role and, and that's what I want to do. And that's what I, I think if you, I think of you is more of like the grain of sand on your feet in bed. You know, that one grain of sand that made it in, like what. Thank you. That's a compliment. Yup. Yup. That's definitely, that was definitely a compliment. So you can tell that David and I have worked together a long time. We have a very, very easy to pick on each other. I would say what's also interesting about the environment that Worthington has built that kind of keeps people motivated and, and not super stressed out is the kind of lack of supervision we have. We always have these kinds of like, team captains. They always kind of, they pop up, they're not appointed, nobody's ever appointed to be a team captain nobody's ever called a team captain, but they kind of float up, you know, because the team captain is, is not on the sideline calling the plays. He's on the field. You know, he's actually running and taking the hit and throwing the ball. And each one of us has that kind of a role. There's nobody here who's really a quote unquote supervisor. Would you agree with that, David? yeah, a hundred percent. We often talk about to be successful here you have to know that some days you're going to be the leader and some days you're going to be led and being comfortable in both roles is really important and not feeling like, Hey, I want to just lead all the time. You know, knowing when to just say, okay, that person has got it. All I can do is just help. I, you know, by being led, I will do whatever this person feels needs to be done because they are the resident expert on that particular topic. So. and, and each one of us, myself included, we all have, you know, various responsibilities, various like things that need to happen to ship something out the door. It's not like any one of us is just solely responsible for going in and checking in on everybody and making sure they're getting their work done and punch the clock on time. There's none of that kind of nonsense know. Yeah. And that was a bit of a surprise for me coming into here because my whole life I had a supervisor standing at the time, clocks watching for the people coming in late and forgetting about the product on the floor. They were more concerned. We were more concerned about you know, who, who didn't make the punch clock on time. And so, so this this environment, this culture that's being created, this culture that's being allowed to be become is, is quite different , than my experience over the past 30 years. And it's been easy for me to transition, I think, because it makes so much sense, you know, once that, yeah. Once, once the light bulb goes off, you've got it. It's like, oh, I understand the importance of it now. I made a list of the things that I do and, you know, I mean on my list is take out trash refilled, toilet paper, shovel, snow. David, when you took a vacation a few weeks ago, nobody knew how to dry their hands in the bathrooms. on me because I, I need to do a better job of showing that. And I'm not the only one who does this you know, some days I don't have time and somebody else says, Hey, I got the trash today, you know, or, Hey, I got the corrugated and, and everybody is empowered to make that decision on the spot. It's not like, well, I need to check with somebody. No, I know that right now I am the best person to do this particular task and, and that's, that's quite cool. And I, and I try to make sure that if I'm taking the corrugated out that day, it's beautiful weather. I'm not, you know, Sunny none of this rain and snow and sleep. Not no, Right, right. The, 75 and bright sun. That's that's what I'm looking for. I guess you're not doing it for a while though. we haven't seen you out there for a while. Chris. It's been It's a shame. I don't know. What's yeah, I'll have to figure out what's what's wrong there. Maybe put together a Kappa, get, get the, get a corrective action going on that I hope so. do the five whys of why Chris, that he's not taking the corrugated out in a couple months. It'll take about three, three. Why's that's all you need. Hm. Hey, the weather's bad B there is no B so one of the things that I think where this sort of a culture develops of, of the sort of supervisory role and not giving anybody control is like fear, right? Fear of making a mistake, fear of shipping something wrong, fear of, of losing money being, being taken advantage of. Right? Why, why are we watching people punch the clock? Cause we don't want to be taken advantage of, Right. and it's like, well, if you're hiring people, you're afraid they're not punching in and out on time, perhaps you've got to reevaluate your hiring process. yes. I wish I had had this whole thought process 30 years ago. I can only imagine what I could have done with my career, but Sure. I think you've done. Okay. David, you landed here the best place possible to that's true. That's right. But I, I'm looking over some of the notes we put together for our conversation and I think it's a great talking point is give workers more control Yeah. and I'm sure you could speak to that, David. Yeah, sure. And this is this is one of those things that you have to really believe. And we do have, we are creating a culture that, that, that little by little, this is happening. You see it more and more people are, are feeling like they understand that they are empowered to take charge, to make those decisions based on good training. You know, if, if you're the resident expert, then you should be making expert type decisions. And so that's part of what we try to do is we try to say, Hey, no, when you can make those decisions, And well, how do I know? Well, you'll know, you will know when the moment is, right. And if you, and if you make a bad decision or if, when in doubt we have certain people that are assigned that they can go to to ask the question to bounce it off somebody first, but after you do it a few times you're going to realize that you can make that decision. And once again, when you're making decisions on the floor that are good decisions, the process speeds up because things don't stop to wait for an answer, things, get things, get done and done, right. And that that's, really cool. the improvement of the process is sped up too, right? Like you can have a process engineer and. You know, there's only 40 hours in a week that, that person's going to help improve the process. But if you have 40 people all working on the process, think about how much more that is going to get accelerated and improved. It's, you know, you spread out that responsibility and the process engineer is not going to be anywhere near as, okay. Let's let's just talk about selective soldering or something like that. Right? A process engineer is going to have no clue. Where is the best location to store these tools that you use regularly. But can you imagine if, if you have your kitchen, we'll bring it back to the remodel. Okay. You have your kitchen and you have your stove. And it's like, okay, well, what do you do at a stove? You need your pots and pans nearby spoons. I dunno, I don't cook very much, but you need all your various tools near your stove. Well, imagine me comes in and goes, why are those pots and pans over there that doesn't make any sense? you hardly even fit them over there. I'm going to put them in the basement closet. They fit so much better in the basement closet. Well then the person who actually does the cooking goes, what the heck have you done with my tools? I need my tools right here. So what if they don't fit perfectly? I need to have them right here. Cause this is where I use them. That, that those kinds of situations can happen all the time. When you have just one knucklehead process engineer, I think we learned a lesson. We learned lessons. One of them was a tool boards. You know, I worked in an organization where we had a person who would go out and put tool boards out and they, they looked wonderful. They were just the best looking tool boards I've ever seen, but our people didn't embrace them and they didn't utilize them. And coming here, I quickly realized that if I design a tool board for somebody they're never going to use it. So once again, it goes back right down to the teammates, all of our teammates. If they want a tool board, they're going to design it. Now they'll have help from people to, you know, put it together, order the materials and things like that, but it's going to be their concept, their design. So yeah I want to go on to the next point, keep the lines of communication open. I mean, that seems obvious. Keep the lines of communication open, but how do you do that effectively to keep, to keep people from burning out and keep them motivated in this high stress environment. What about keeping the lines of communication? Facilitates that I would, I would say. That, how we keep our lines of communication open is we have different, we have maybe four or five different ways to communicate here. You can send it, you know, the old fashioned email we can, we can instant message. We have production boards. Yeah, no we don't. We got rid of that just a month ago. okay. We have, you know, we have our production schedule that everybody can has access to the same information and can post information to make the process more successful. So a teammate may identify that a certain part has to be you know, installed on certain board are so many boards, 20 boards get this part and 40 boards get that part. And it's, it's a little bit hard to. You know, without three meetings and, and spending hours on this, because, you know, we are not your typical manufacturer because we're making maybe six different products in a day. So we have a production, a board that is electronic, that that teammate can say, Hey, by the way, don't forget to do this. And then the next person looks at that and goes, oh, thank you, teammate. You know? And, and there's no conversation. It's just how that kind of flows. And anytime you can take conversation out and replace it with, with information, I guess information. Yeah. Then, then once, then you're speeding up the process again. So we love to chat it up. We love to talk about things, but every time we talk about things, we question it and say, is it something that next time we need to talk about or put it into the process and those challenges? We have, we have a great bunch of people that ask those questions Yup. I'll give you a perfect example. Something happened to us just today to kind of put a bow on what David was just saying. We had We have this product that has a ceramic, I think it's ceramic,, it's an antenna. It looks like a ceramic antenna surface, Mount antenna. And the way that it looks like you're supposed to populate it is, you know, up and down for example. But then when we're looking at the data sheet, it looks like it's supposed to go down and up rather than up and down. And when you run into those situations where you have kind of a disagreement of the appropriate way of populating this thing, those are the times where you have to chat it up. You have to just, okay, let's, let's have the conversation and try to figure out what we're going to do next about this, because we don't really know that this is the right way, or this is the wrong way, but what that can develop into is, okay, how often are we having to have these kinds of conversations? And are they the same types of conversations that we keep having over and over and over? And if they are, where can we resolve these things way ahead of time or streamline that conversation. So perhaps doesn't even need to happen. So in the future, everybody knows antennas get populated up and down, or, you know, this is not exactly the, the, the analogy is fallen apart a little bit here, but you, you end up building these things into the process where it just, Nope, this is the way we do it every single time. And there's no more need to have a long conversation about that because at the end of the day it's all about solder joints, not conversations. People pay us for solder joint. It's not for having conversations, right? Well said, Yeah. But it's, it's it can be tricky. I, I agree. I think that's valuable, but I think the other thing too, when I was reading, when I was reading over these notes here, keep the lines of communication open, it reminded me of. The opportunity people have to speak up about, Hey, this doesn't make any sense, Yeah. right? Like somebody going in and populating something wrong like that antenna, maybe doing it upside down and not having a fear of reprisal, you know, that somebody's gonna be like, don't question that. That's what it says in the print. You got to build it like that. Yes. And, and that's just, I don't think we have anything like that. no. And so we, we have, you know, we have this process that we go, let me begin by saying we are all asked to speak up. The whole philosophy of this company has been summarized on two pages. It's a core value what our core values are and what our successful habits are. And the particular one that you said was if something doesn't look right, you know, if something doesn't make sense, bring it. Because we are the resident experts when it comes across our workstation where the person working on it, chances are, we know as much about it as anybody else in the, in the building. So if it doesn't look right to us, we need to ask the question and we are embraced. It's one of those things that we're asked to do. So it is part of the culture. And, and I think quite often people in other work environments are afraid to bring things up because they're afraid. They're afraid that maybe they don't know something that they're supposed to know. And, and here we, we kind of spin it the other way. We say, Hey, we say, Hey, we don't really know what you know. So when you're unsure, feel free to talk about. Oh, man, that's heartbreaking. Just what you just said. I could, I could never imagine myself working in a situation where I'm embarrassed to mention that I don't understand something like how awful would that be? I would be terrible. it wouldn't be good for me. I asked that question five times a day. Just, no, it just be terrible. I would be. So I would just feel terrible about that. So yes, very, very glad to not have that type of environment here. I think, you know, I suspect that that folks who are, who are Listening to the show probably, you know, find themselves in an environment that's not like that. But if you do work in that environment, by all means, give us a call we're hiring. So if you want to get out of that nonsense and be treated with respect yeah, you'll certainly find that here. Well, I will say, you know, you touched on a little bit company culture being important. So we had a interview With Eli Hughes. Gosh, that had to have been early 20, 20, something like that. Mid 20, 20. No, cause we started the show in mid 2020. When do you think that was Melissa? I don't know. I have no concept of time anymore. I know that's, that's, that's just called pandemic time. It's just nonsense time at this point. It doesn't make any sense. But he, he was great listening to him because he really talked about culture and how important it was to keep people motivated. And at the time, you know, we, we were on this, this turbulent ground of, of the pandemic and everything. Not that we aren't now, but it was just especially a turbulent around that time and trying to keep everybody's spirits high and keep the culture the same as it was. And I don't exactly know where I'm going with this other than the fact that it's just very important to keep, you know, to cultivate a culture because they culture will develop whether you cultivate it or not. And it may develop into something you don't like. Yeah. Do you agree? I would just say that setting expectations. When you create a culture there has to be some expectations that are laid out and and this culture is, has probably been around since the owners of this company purchased it, because I believe that they have always felt that this, the way that we do business is the right way to do business. So. Over the years, this culture has been nudged along has kind of developed because the culture never changed. It. It was like, you always knew that if you asked a question, you would not be treated like you were less, you know, stupid, you would be treated like, thank you for asking the question. You always knew that if you weren't having fun, well, maybe, maybe you should go find a job somewhere else where you can have fun because we believe here that if you're not having fun. And that, that is a great way to fight off stress is remembering that every once in a while you can just have a little bit of fun and move on and it, it makes your team feel at ease. It makes you feel at ease it. And so we fight stress in all kinds of different ways by being good teammates. We fight stress by, by listening better. And I'm not a great listener. I'm learning to listen. What were you I said, I'm not, you you've done this to me before. Thank you. It's so, so all of these things you know, kind of establishes our culture and you know, so every day we work on culture every day, we remind ourselves that there is a, the simple two pages that the core values and the successful habits, those are what we hang our hat on. And if we can do all of these well, chances are, it allows us to be humble teammates. That get along well, that when there is trouble on the floor, you know, when there is a problem with a particular build, they know that their teammates have their back. They know they can go to a another expert and consult. They know they can resolve it immediately via those are just such tools that everybody has access to. That is going to continue to get better over time because the message I don't believe will ever change. I believe that this message is the message and people will get more and more comfortable with it. So, you know, right now I'd say we are doing an excellent job. We're doing an excellent job of becoming better teammates. As far as, you know, as far as. What each department does. I don't really know, I don't work in those departments, so I'm not an expert on anything. But I am an expert on, on knowing if thank you. I probably won't. But, but what I am an expert on is, is, is I truly believe that with good culture with, with a good work environment. Yeah, if you have, you have less turnover, you have happy people, you have good product we really do not have much turnover at all at all. Really is quite interesting how people once, once they get in and get settled in. Everybody sticks around. It seems everybody really enjoys working here. I know I do. So. There, you know, there's like, there's this kind of idea that I, I love to say is like everybody has, has gets their own access to sunlight. So everybody that works here has their own access to sunlight. I mean, there's nothing hovering over them. That is going to block it, going to create shade. We all stand alone, but we work together here. What I mean by the sunlight thing, which is probably hard to understand. But you, in these in these work environments where you have levels of management, you know, you have a floor, a floor lead, then you have a supervisor, then you have a superintendent. All of those people are blocking the sun. You know, they're blocking you from, from getting that shiny, you know, beautiful sun coming into your world and keeping you, keeping you healthy and happy. Because you have all of the, you know, you're just in the shade, you're just turning gray. Hmm. I remember my wife she, she had a job at a bank and she had a poor manager. Let's just say, I don't want to get into, it's just not a good manager. Right. And a bank is a bank is a classic example of structure bureaucracy, you know, tiers of, of supervisors and the sub supervisors and the managers and the night manager. It's just a million different, you know, ladders. You have to climb there. And when she, and she would, she still talks about this to this day, when she had a good manager, she was excited to go to work. And when she had a bad manager, she, she wanted to quit all the time. And I think anybody who's listening to this can probably relate to that. If you have a great manager that, you know, because you work in an environment that has management which is not uncommon, it's I think probably the most common thing. You probably know what I'm talking about. You're probably excited to be part of that team or, or you work in a large enough company where everybody knows, oh, George is the good manager. That's the guy you want to get on George's team. You know, you, you don't want to get on Carl's team because Carl was, he just, you know, nobody likes working with him. Carl was blocking your sunlight and George is getting out of the way and he's allowing you to absorb that sun. So what's, what's the whole point, right? What's the whole point of having George and Carl, they're just, you know, George is, George is getting all the praise. Cause all the only thing he does is get out of people's way. yes, but when you're calling from outside and you want, wanna, you want to yell at somebody, you wanna yell at that supervisor so he can go yell at somebody else. Sorry, sorry. But a good, a good a manager, you know, you're George, he is making sure that you have the resources you need to get the job done. And he's not standing in the way of that. Obviously there's reasonable expectations, you can't buy a$250,000 x-ray without perhaps, you know, I don't think you can put that on the company card, so there's some bureaucracy when it comes to big money or big complicated decisions, like buying a new place machine or something like that. But you need this tool. Yeah. Get the tool like. I don't know that you need that tool, but tell me you need that tool. Let's get it. Let's get it ordered. Let's let that sunshine and, and you know, get to work. yeah, it creates a good feeling. It does I like that illustration. I'm going to try to remember that one, David, that the sunshine getting out of people's way, letting the light shine. How do you think it's been one thing that I've been thinking about a little bit lately and perhaps others have too, is helping people during this pandemic, because whether or not they're directly affected or infected by the virus or perhaps their family members aren't feeling well from it or something like that in the work environment, you know, you're relying on, on so-and-so to be here and then they can't be here because they got sick. And this is just going around like crazy. How, how have you found. It's been with trying to help people through that. And what is, what is it like in our culture, trying to, trying to navigate those waters? I think that there's this acceptance that right now with COVID. Things are going to get upset. There'll be days when things don't happen as fast as they should. It's because we, you know, you may have three people out for COVID or COVID exposure. And we live in this work environment where people understand that it is going to happen and it is going to have an effect. And I think that by knowing that nobody is going to be screaming at you, that you're allowed to focus and say, you know, oh, I don't have to prepare for when I'm going to get in trouble for not picking up the slack of my teammate. So that gives me the time it gives me the time and energy to over-perform today. Even more than I normally shine, I will shine even better because. Because I am not preoccupied with what is going to happen during this. It happens. There's nothing we can do about it. So everybody just do the best you can with what you have. And we've had some really good results with it. And people feel like the company feel, they feel like they're cared about by their teammates who, you know, who don't second guess them for being out for four days because of exposure five days. They just feel like when they come back, they're probably more energized knowing that they're going to hit the floor, running their teammates, know that they did what they had to do. Yeah, I, it's really hard to explain because we don't have a, like a playbook, but we do do a lot. We do a lot of Hey, you know, I just need somebody over here today to help fill in this position. And we're allowed to look at our job for the day and say, you know what, I, I've got an hour and a half that I can spare. Why don't I just go over and do it? And we have a lot of people, a lot of people who move around and find ways to cross train themselves that in other environments they would be waiting for a supervisor to assign them. And here they know we assigned ourselves. I'm sorry. You know, I I've been a supervisor. I love supervisors. But I really love the fact that we work hard to keep that, that out of here and, and allow us to self supervise, we're a team of, of adults that make good decisions. Why don't we self supervise? That's right. That's right. Couldn't have said it any better. I'll give you an example of about, you know, waiting for permission to train yourself on something. It just reminded me of they were just talking about bureaucracy and waiting for somebody to make a decision. I was I was installing this machine at a, a massive, massive, massive defense contractor. And the machine is uncrated. They, they had uncrated it for me. And it was, it was set in place and it wasn't plugged in and it's just, it's the machine didn't take any special power. It's just regular, you know, American one 10 power, which you'd find in most north America here. And I was like, oh, okay, let me plug this in. And the guy goes, whoa, what are you doing? I'm like, well, to get started, we need power. I'm going to plug it in. He goes, oh, you can't do that. But you mean, I can't do that. No, you need an electrician to do I need an electrician? Oh yeah. This guy was so excited. He was so excited. He's like, I'll put in an order to get an electrician to have this to have this plugged in. Really. Okay. Sure. What do we do to them? He says, well, we just get to know each other a little bit. We literally just sat there in front of the machine and just talked for like hours and then it was lunchtime. So then we went to the cafeteria, had our lunch, came back, electrician came maybe half an hour after that, asked me a little bit about the machines and requirements and things. And I told him and he goes, okay. And he just leaned over and plugged it in. And I'll never forget how excited this guy was that he had to wait for the electric. He didn't want to work. Right. He, he was so thrilled that all we got to do is just sit around and chat for a while and not train on the machine or learn anything new. And I take that lesson to heart because I think to myself, never, never hire that guy. Right. Never build a team of people that are excited to not work. Nobody nooooo body at Worthington assembly has that attitude. I think the complete opposite. I think if anybody finds themselves standing still for more than 60 seconds, they like get, like, they don't know what to do with themselves. They just start walking around looking for something to do because they can't stand not working. There's no question. This is one of the busiest places self-imposed you know, finding quality work to do. And that's the thing too is it's not just busy work quite often. They find quality work to do a big difference. Yeah. Things that are going to create solder joints. I like to say, Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny. We talk about value added versus non-value added work and, and by calling it's awful because by calling it non-value added work, it sounds like such a pejorative. Like it doesn't matter, but it's like, no, these, like, you still need to do that. Like you still sometimes need to count parts. It's called non-value added because counting parts doesn't go towards creating solder joints, right? You're not actually creating a solder joint by counting parts. You need to find a different way to avoid that to avoid having to do that or filling a rack, you know, filling a rack of with boards that is not. There's that is not creating a solder joint. Right. It's non-value added work. Find a way to avoid doing that sort of thing. So when you talk about finding people, finding quality work, they're not just walking around and like, oh, well I got five minutes to burn. I'm going to sweep the floor. They might, that they might cause it has to get done. Right. But more often than not, they're going to be looked for something that moves the product out the door that creates, you know, something that creates a solder joint that gets it to the point where we can ship it to the customer. yes, yes. Yeah. It's a lot of work though, man. It's a lot of work. Say absolutely. We spend as a team, we spend as much effort and energy into trying to improve our daily processes, as we would, it's hard to explain, but there's a lot of effort. There's a lot of effort that goes into becoming good teammates. There's a lot of energy that's expended on learning how to talk to a coworker about an issue and being able to get through that conversation without having to have a supervisor come in and be the go-between. You know, so there's a lot of energy that we, that we do expend during the course of a day that, that if we just had supervisors in the building, we may not. It's just the everything flows through. But it makes us all better, the better, you know, so as we improve as teammates, we become better communicators. We become more our abilities to do our part of the process improve. There's so many things that happen through just working together. I would say another, an example of that would be, you know, sometimes I'll walk the floor and you know, look over and you're going, huh? What's that bin doing there and you look at it and it's got like a nice label on it and it's got dividers and everything is like sorted properly. And you're like, where did that come from? And it's like, oh yeah, well, you know, Lisa thought it'd be a good idea if we got these things out here because it just happens. It didn't take anybody to get involved to create that bin and to label it and to organize it. It just happened. It just, you know, it got, it got flowing. And I hopefully that's an example of the kind of thing you're talking about there. It is. And thank you. As a matter of fact, we should have invited you on the show to do my speaking part. Cause you're doing a better job than I did. That is a perfect explanation. you're at the 40,000 foot level, David I'm down here on the ground, just explaining the, the real life situations, the real examples that happen. Okay, good. That's the reason we're laughing so hard to the inside joke. David always says that I'm the 40,000 foot guy. He makes fun of me. So I'm like the plane that buzzes in then buzzes back out of there. But keep, keep doing what you do. So, David anything else you'd like to share before we get into our favorite segment of the show? I hope you came prepared for our favorite segment of the show. I did I came prepared. No, I, I think I've, I think I've probably spoken, I probably talk more about this culture then than I needed to, but it's, it is, it is pretty unique and I'm just very, very proud of what, what everybody has pulled off here. Here here yeah. And, and I, I feel like, you know, my involvement has been just being, trying to communicate that, Hey, you know, it is okay. I have no real, no real technical value in this company. But I think if, you know, I try to treat, so they, I think people see me as I'm the person who tries to treat all my teammates as my favorite teammate. And, and they see me as if they need something and I'm able to get it, I'm going to get it as quickly as I possibly can. And, you know, and I hope that those, whatever few things that I can do can inspire people to say, Hey, Hm. that's cool. Can I think I should do that? You know, like pay it forward. I, I should, I should now do the same thing for, for the next teammate. And, and if, if I can do that I think I'm, I'm adding value. And it was as long as I keep walking fast, as long as I can continue to walk fast, I'll be okay. For listeners of the show have not experienced this. If you've ever watched the Looney tunes, cartoon coyote, and Roadrunner, David puts the road runner to shame when it comes to walking. That's for sure, that man is, he is a speed demon when it comes to walking. We I love, I love to joke with you, David. Obviously we have, we have good laughs, but I mean this, with all sincerity, you mentioned being you hoping to inspire other people, without question, I personally have taken inspiration from you and, and the way you go about things. Your explanation of visual indicators and how to effectively use a Kanban system was a complete light bulb moment for me. It was like, I get it now. I totally get it. You, you set the example. I remember I'll never forget. I walked over to a stack of cardboard boxes you know, before they become boxes, they were, they were just knocked down. Right. They're just flat as they come to us from staples or wherever we get them. And and I saw this bright yellow laminated sheet of paper sticking out the side of the boxes and I'm like, okay, what on earth is this, I pick up the stack of boxes and I look at it and it's got all this information and it had on it and explanation of what it was. And it said that this is a Kanban ticket and this is like, oh, of course it's a, I think so much of Kanban is being electronic. Just call it just the age I grew up in. But that was a very, you know, Kanbans are very electronic things from what I was familiar with, but this was a physical, real world example of it. And it was a complete game changer for me mentally about how we can organize our materials here. And I absolutely loved it. So you do inspire people, David. Absolutely. Keep it up. Thank you. All right. So what's your pet peeve of the week? I'm excited. I don't think it's going to surprise you. It's my circle of concern. Circle of influence. Nice. Oh, I like this a lot. Please. Please give the background explanation of what you mean by. Well, the background is there was a book written by a gentlemen named, I think Stephen Covey, seven habits of highly successful people. And there was a section in there that caught my eye years ago and it was called their circle of influence in the circle of concern and it, and it talks about, and this goes to our organization so much because in this organization we're pushed to be in the circle of influence, which means if I have a problem, if I have a problem and. I want it to change. Well I need to first identify who is the most important person to get into my circle that can help me make that change. So it's not going to a coworker who doesn't even work in my department, who has no idea and me sharing the story, oh, I hate the way we do this. We're empowered here to make the change. So all we need to do is take that energy. And instead of complaining to a coworker, you take that energy and you move it to the person who's going to help you make that change. And if it's impossible, if you can't make the change well, at least, you know, you, you did what you had to do when we say, keep it in front of you. Now, always remember why we could not make that improvement or that change. But it's not worth complaining about it's worth keeping in front of us because later on, we may be able to make that change, but so always move to move to being, you know, making the change, not just complaining about something. And, and and so, I think we, we do a very fine job here of that. And we talk a lot about it. We talk about circle of influence and circle of concern. We stole that and we have just run with it. Yeah. We certainly have, I think it's very, very easy to live in the circle of concern. Right. We all do it. It's, it's part of socializing when you're with your friends, you know, you just start to like, ah, did you hear about this? And wow, this politician that, you know, it's like, it's kinda just what we do as human beings, but it's so unhealthy in a work environment. So unhealthy and it can be so dangerous because you can just really tear apart an otherwise great teammate because they did something to annoy you. And now you're just, you know, you're just living in that circle of concern and just tearing them apart. And it's, that's a good pet Or, or you're tearing yourself apart because you can't go talk to the person who, who is, can influence that can make that change. And we do, we really we really ask everybody to feel confident enough with their relationships, with their coworkers, that they should be able to engage in those conversations because we get along wonderfully for the most part, but there are stressful days and there are moments when, when we need to talk through situations. Take it home with us and bring it back in the next morning. I don't think it's good practice. And I don't think my teammates do either. I think, I think they handle it pretty well. Yes. So, you know, and one of the things that we do here is we do a peer to peer review. I mean, Hmm, every two weeks another teammate is being getting a peer review, which means all of the teammates are are looking at them based on the successful habits and core core values. Which once again it reminds us all the time of, you know, instead of having a policy book that tells us what we can't do, we have core values and successful habits. It tells us what we can do and what we should do. So, so it's, it's a, it's a very, it's a very healthy thing that we're, that we're working through here creating. that's quite a statement, David. We don't have a book of rules telling us what we cannot do it. What's the point of explaining what you can't do when all you need to do is show people what you should be doing. Yeah, it's amazing. And if it, if it falls out of those boundaries and you know, it, there's no reason to, you know, explain any further. And I think that these successful habits and core values have been through the years, even before I got here. Uh we're we're part of what the teammates the team wanted. And I think that the ownership group embraced it and said, okay, let's, let's formalize it and let's set expectations. And so, so every day we work through it, but it's, it's creating a lot of, a lot of good, a lot of good. So you, your, your, your pet peeve of the week was basically just more of the same episode. I was hoping something about, you know, bad pilsners is like a pet pee, like who, you know, you don't drink bad pills there. Is there something. No. Never start with a triple IPA. dude, amen to that. That is words to live by. That is words to live by. Yeah. And if you do finish with a AAA, have an enormous glass of water afterward, otherwise you're going to wake up with quite a headache, Sorry. Spent great. David, is there any other words of wisdom that you'd like to share with us? No, I really appreciate coming on here. I would like to put a Yeah. Maybe now you'll listen to the show. I, I, I am listening to them. But I would like to, I'd like to put a disclaimer in here and say that I'm not the architect of any of this. I'm. I'm just one teammate who, who is excited about it. And so, you know, when, when the other teammates hear this I'm just, I'm just one of many who was making it happen. So, and if I came across sounding like, that it was an, I, I apologize because it is definitely a team environment here and I'm just, you know, one of the, one of the teammates. So that's, that's all I wanted to say. yeah, well, you have a passion for it. And, and so it's exciting to talk to you about the subject, because it is a passion that you have simple as that. Well, we appreciate everybody listening and I hope everybody enjoyed hearing from David. And if you ever want to know more about how to motivate your team and keep spirits high and avoid burnout you can, you can email us so we can put you in touch with him. Our email address addresses contact at pic place, podcast.com. You're always welcome to tweet at us at circuit hub or at w assembly. And David is at David. Is that right? that correct at David on Twitter? Is that no, that's not correct. What's Twitter. we'll have to double check that. Thanks so much for coming on the show, David. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to the thick place podcast. If you like, what you heard consider following us in your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from. Thanks again, David thank you Thanks David