You pay for the slowest person in the room.

One day a week

I was 21 and I waited tables at a pub. Some nights I worked the bar. When the pandemic hit I said yes to helping out in the kitchen one day a week. But then they needed an extra hand on Friday, and I said yes to that too.

A month after my first shift in there I looked at the schedule and I was on as a cook, and that was all. That was five or six days a week. But I didn't work the floor again. The pub didn't ask me, because keeping me in the kitchen was easier.

That's how I ended up on the cold station. It had the starters, the desserts, the plating, and for some reason the fryer. On a busy night I walked maybe 50 meters between three stations, but the grill cook stood in a two meter square. And I plated for him too.

I'd be halfway through a cheese board when I'd realize the fries weren't in the oil. But the fryer was 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, since the grill was his and the cold station was mine. The head chef had split the job that way. But the rule didn't get the fries into the oil. People did, when they wanted to.

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

The steps stay

I get why the head chef wrote the split. Give a station its own list and two cooks stop skipping the same thing, and I'd keep that. But then the place grows, and something goes wrong on a Tuesday, and the answer is a step. It works, so it stays.

Next year something else goes wrong, so that gets a step too. Each step fixed something real. But ten years on, the guest is still waiting for hot food, and the job is steps.

Taking one away is harder than adding one. You can defend a new step in a meeting. But to remove one you have to say out loud that the thing it protected against can happen again. Try that in the same meeting. And the steps stay.

And the people who do the work well pay the most for this, because they get held to the pace the slowest person needed. 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. Every Friday one of us had to build next week's schedule. That was about fifteen steps, all copying between spreadsheets. One file fed another. Attendance sat in a third as ones and half ones. But the two minutes that mattered were somewhere in the middle. That's where we kept all the new starters, the borrowed staff and who works one station all week.

When I got it right it took 30 minutes. But when I got it wrong the files stopped syncing, so a picker on leave would turn up on the schedule. A day went by before we spotted the mistake. Then I'd call them at home to ask where they were.

Then came the hunt for the person who could fix it. The hunt was a jungle, because the file had no owner, only names. Call him, he'll know. But he's not in today, so try this guy instead. Sometimes they found the error at once, and 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, because the other warehouses built the same schedule every Friday.

Five of us could have taken turns. But do it every fifth week and you don't remember how, so you get it wrong. Then you feel foolish about it and keep quiet. 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, but four years later we were still getting it wrong.

Most weeks the schedule came to me and one other person. That wasn't anyone's decision. We could do it, so it came to us. But those 30 minutes came on top of the rest. Some of our team leaders ended up building it too, and that was our job and not theirs. And when I left, it moved on to whoever else could do it.

A rule we don't enforce doesn't go away. But it turns into an unwritten one, so whoever can do it ends up doing it.

Where routines belong

Fifty people pick orders and work starts at seven. That isn't free-form thinking work, and it shouldn't be, so I'd write those routines again tomorrow.

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

The difference

A process is how the work gets done. But good enough is a separate question, so that's for a standard to answer.

"The cold station does the fries" is a process. "The guest gets hot food" is a standard. Same kitchen. But only 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. An AI colleague in Mellovy works in your tools on a whole computer of its own. We don't tell it how. But we do look at what comes back, to see if it matches what finished work looks like.

And if your organization has a Manager, that's a colleague who sets the standard for its area. And that colleague corrects work below the standard.

There's no step list to follow, and that means there's no step list to hide behind either. But 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 hours away from the people I worked with. Let a machine do the copying. Keep the conversation for yourself. You can't automate a relationship, and if you text somebody instead of talking to them, they can tell.

Benjamin is the one who said the thing that got me out. You don't owe a company your whole self to prove you should be there, but it owes you something back.

And the next post is about what happens when work comes back under the standard. That part we do in the open.