quick story about culture to illustrate what i'm talking about. many moons ago, i was a front line supervisor for a company, and we handled all types of different products. one particular type of product was 20' (or longer) bundles of pipe and steel.
we had guys that would use forklifts to try and move them, they'd try to balance htem on the end of the blades, and, long story short, they'd spend 15 minutes trying to get it balanced so they could move it, then another 10 minutes moving it, and then another 10 minutes trying to place it. and that's if everything went well. if it fell and busted, they'd spend another 15 minutes re stacking, and then repeat the balancing act.
so we as managers decided these things needed to moved on hand trucks. you could lay the pipe over the top of a hand truck that was laid on it's back and basically create a see-saw, and then you just push down on one end, and you could wheel that thing anywhere you wanted. in about 10% of the time, and a lot less chance of the damage.
but many of these guys had worked there for years, and were resistent to actually getting off the lift, and doing something manual....so in the beginning there was a lot of follow up, making people do it, stopping them from doing it the old way, etc, etc, etc...fast forward about 6 months after all that, ....if there was a guy tring to put that type of product on a forklift, you'd have 10 other guys (their peers) yelling at him "HAND TRUCK!!!!", and he would be shamed in to getting off the lift and moving it the "right" way. supervisors and managers never had to say a word.
just one example. but that's changing a culture. we changed "the how", not "the what". and the guys that bought in (or were forced to in some cases thru some disciplinary action) wound up holding each other accountable to doing it that way.
