You pay for the slowest person in the room.

One day a week

I was 21, waiting tables at a pub and sometimes working the bar. When the pandemic hit I said yes to helping out in the kitchen one day a week, prepping. Could you take this one. Sure. We need someone extra on Friday. Sure, I can do that.

A month after my first shift in there I looked at the schedule and I was only on as a cook. Five or six days a week. I never worked the floor again, and not once did anyone ask me. Keeping me in the kitchen was easier, so the schedule kept me there.

That's how I ended up on the cold station. Starters, desserts, plating, and for some reason the fryer. On a busy night I covered maybe 50 meters between three stations while the grill cook worked inside a two meter square. I plated for him too.

Then I'd be halfway through a cheese board and realize the fries weren't in the oil. The fryer stood one meter from him.

Some nights the basket went in anyway. Those were the nights I worked with a friend. Other nights the fries sat where they were. The grill was his and the cold station was mine. The head chef had split the job that way. Same rule, same kitchen, different food. The rule never got the fries into the oil. People did, when they felt like it.

Then my friend quit and moved, and the kitchen was people I didn't have that with. They offered me the grill full time. I said no and handed in my notice instead. I'd said yes to one day a week.

The steps stay

The split wasn't stupid when someone wrote it. Give a station its own list and two cooks stop skipping the same thing. I'd keep that.

Then the place grows. Something goes wrong on a Tuesday, and the answer is a step. The step works, so it stays. Next year something else goes wrong, and that gets a step too. Every one of them fixed something that had actually gone wrong that week. Ten years on, the job is mostly steps, and the guest is still waiting for hot food.

Taking one away is harder than adding one. Adding a step is a decision you can defend in a meeting. Removing it means saying out loud that the thing it protected against can happen again. Try that in the same meeting. The steps stay.

Your best people pay the most for this. The fastest person on the floor gets held to the pace the slowest one needed. The steps were there for the slowest one. And when the steps break, the work slides to whoever gets it right, and it stays there.

Fifteen steps and two minutes

At a warehouse years later I was a group manager, and every Friday one of us built next week's schedule. Around fifteen steps of copying between spreadsheets. One file fed another. Attendance sat in a third as ones and half ones. Somewhere in the middle sat about two minutes that mattered. New starters, borrowed staff, who works one station all week.

Get it right and it took 30 minutes. Get it wrong and the files stopped syncing, so a picker on leave would turn up on the schedule. Then I'd call them at home to ask where they were. A day to notice.

Then came the hunt for the person who could fix it. A jungle. The file had no owner, only names. Call him, he usually knows. He's not in today. Try this guy instead. Sometimes they found the error at once. Sometimes they rebuilt the file so we could start over. I've sat on calls with them for up to two hours, and that's my time and theirs. And it wasn't only our warehouse. Every warehouse in the company built the same schedule every Friday.

Five of us could have taken turns. Do it every fifth week and you don't remember how. You get it wrong. Then you feel stupid about it, so you say nothing. We'd built something that made people nervous about doing their own job. We fixed that with an A4 with the steps printed on it. Four years later we were still getting it wrong.

Most weeks it came to me and one other person. Not by anyone's decision. We could do it, so it came to us. Those 30 minutes were extra. They replaced nothing. Every group manager had a team leader, and some of those team leaders ended up building the schedule too. That was our job and not theirs. When I left, it moved to whoever was left who could do it.

A rule a company won't enforce doesn't go away. It turns into an unwritten one, and whoever can do it ends up doing it.

Where routines belong

Fifty people picking orders. Work starts at seven. That isn't free-form thinking work. It shouldn't be. I'd write those routines again tomorrow.

The other direction failed. Somebody doing the job every day sees a better way and says it out loud. That has to go up to the people who write the routines and come back changed. Ours mostly died on the way.

The difference

A process tells you how the work gets done. Good enough is a separate question, and a standard is what answers it.

"The cold station does the fries" is a process. "The guest gets hot food" is a standard. Same kitchen. One of them cares whether the food turns up.

Our manifesto says we worship standards and reject process. I've been on the wrong end of the other one long enough to mean it. Mellovy measures an Employee against what finished work looks like and leaves the method alone. A Manager sets the standard for their area and corrects work below it.

There's no step list to follow, and that means there's no step list to hide behind either. The second half matters as much as the first. Steps are a place to hide. Do all fifteen and the schedule can still be wrong, and you can still point at the fifteen.

All that copying between spreadsheets took the hours that should have gone to the people I worked with. Let a machine copy the spreadsheets and keep the conversation for yourself. You can't automate a relationship. Text somebody instead of talking to them and they can tell.

Benjamin is the one who said the thing that got me out. You don't owe a company all of yourself to prove you should be there. It owes you something back.

What happens when work comes back under the standard is the next post, and we do that part in front of everyone.