A and B team mentality threatens competitiveness in industry

By Henrik Holvad, managing director, RIVAL, 28.04.2008

The danger of splitting white-collar and blue-collar workers into an A team and a B team is that we cannot attract skilled production staff. And that, in turn, threatens our competitiveness, which is often based on a high level of professional competency.

We are all familiar with the classic image of the factory gates and the silent, empty yard. Then the factory whistle sounds and a huge flock of men dressed in overalls suddenly appears – the working day is over and they’re on their way home. Now, let’s imagine the scene in front of the head office of one of the major national banks for instance. It’s five o'clock in the afternoon. The whistle sounds, and out come huge numbers of men and women dressed in tailor-made suits, all clutching a briefcase. Doesn’t quite work, does it? There is still a difference between white-collar workers and blue-collar workers. While the working conditions of white-collar workers have changed drastically over the past 15 years or so, not much has happened in the production department. Needless to say, new technology has introduced far greater flexibility into the working lives of white-collar workers, who can now bank over the Internet and work from home.

But just because some workers have to be present in front of a machine at the workplace, there is no need to treat them like battery hens. Especially not since technological advances have also transformed the factory floor. Traditional specialised workers are hardly to be found anymore. Their work has been taken over by machines or relocated to foreign factories. A practical aptitude, as careers teachers used to call it when describing the talents, or lack thereof, of pupils that didn’t really fit in anywhere, is no longer enough. Today’s factory worker is a highly trained specialist with deep technical insight.

Clocks and whistles
Even so, the corporate culture in many production companies does not appear to have changed a great deal since the 1950s. The aforementioned factory whistle still proclaims the start and end of every break, as well as the end of the working day. There’s the factory manager in his glass cage, set above the factory floor to give him a clear view of the workers. Then there’s the time clock. In some companies, there is still an apartheid-like divide between white-collar workers and blue-collar workers. There’s the case of the managing director at a production company who set up a fitness centre for all employees – with the one small difference that white-collar workers could use it as and when they wanted, while blue-collar workers had to clock out. At another factory, white-collar workers were allowed to go to the shared canteen at five to twelve so they could get their hands on the best of an otherwise excellent lunch menu before the whistle sounded for blue-collar workers. There are many other, similar stories. They may seem insignificant, but they are enough to raise the question of whether we are still splitting these two groups into an A team and a B team.

New generations are different
New generations of machinists are not willing to put up with what they see as a disturbing trend. They are individualists who do not view themselves as workers, but as specialised and highly qualified craftsmen who want a challenging job and a say in the work they do. Just like everyone else in society. And that’s what enables a company like ours to compete with similar production companies abroad – the adaptability, creativity, expertise and high level of professional competence of our employees. If we are to make the idea of working in industrial production attractive, which is essential if we want to keep up, then we have to create an atmosphere that makes our employees feel valued. Nowadays, we expect them to assume responsibility – to do so, we need to afford them the same level of freedom as others within the company.

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