#lean staffing

I was interested to read here that lean staffing is, according to this writer, not a proper or intended implementation of "lean manufacturing", but is rather a perversion or corruption of the original idea. Before this I had no clue that lean was a broader concept than deliberate understaffing, let alone contrary to it.

Lean manufacturing as a methodology is reportedly focused on eliminating waste in operations, and does have a link with being short-staffed, but (as is claimed) only in the sense of being an important tool for weathering out periods of worker shortages, not in the sense of prescribing worker shortages: https://ciftinnovation.org/manufacturing/3-benefits-of-implementing-lean-into-your-manufacturing-production-a-blog-series/. The idea being that if you are understaffed, then it's important to reorganize your workplace and prioritize things that actually add value for the customer. In my novice analysis, I think what has happened in our modern economy is that many executives learned about this lean manufacturing concept, then (stupidly) thought to themselves "hey, why do I need adequate staffing in the first place if I can use these methods to deal with understaffing? I'm such a business genius; there's no way this will backfire!"

I remember reading one time an article about fast food workers talking about not getting adequate first aid treatment for burns while on the job. Yesterday I cut my finger chopping up apples. When I was heavily involved in Food Not Bombs, this sort of thing happened all the time -- small cuts, small burns, one time tripping and spraining both wrists, which put me out of commission for about two months. (I was relying heavily on my parents at the time for things like medical expenses; I'm not sure how I would have managed otherwise tbh. Conceptually I like Food Not Bombs, but housing and health care are actually much bigger deals than food, in terms of how to get basic survival needs taken care of outside of the system. Whether you're outside of it on purpose or involuntarily.) What I'm trying to say is: when I'd get burned, I'd take a break from working as long as I needed to to get the burn cooled down, like a normal human being who's interacting with other normal human beings. And generally this was very effective in keeping those burns minor -- the heat can keep doing damage for some time after the initial injury, so cooling it down and staying away from the stove for a while is actually really important. This really should be how it is everywhere. But in order to do that, you either have to be willing to do less work some of the time and not get everything done, and/or have more people doing the work than you strictly speaking need if everything goes right. (With Food Not Bombs, it's volunteer run, and sometimes you've got plenty of people and sometimes you don't.) Fast food places aren't willing to do that, it cuts into profits. They do lean staffing, where you have the absolute bare minimum of employees you need to do the job if everyone is working hard and no one is sick or injured and everything goes right, all of the time. This is not necessary or helpful from a perspective of getting the job done, in this case feeding people. It is only necessary from a perspective of maximizing profits. You know what else isn't necessary for getting the job done? Most of the boss/employee dynamic. As in: generally you are going to want someone who's got a big-picture plan and is telling other people where they fit in the plan. That is generally a load-bearing aspect of getting things done with multiple people. In order to have a Food Not Bombs cookhouse, you have someone who promises that it's going to happen every week, called the bottom-liner, and in practice the bottom-liner is also often the "boss" in the sense of "hey, we need someone to make a salad dressing" and "hey, who's doing the bagel pick-up next week?" and so on. But generally not the boss in terms of telling people "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" or what have you, in terms of forcing people to work. People are there voluntarily. And the bar for kicking out a volunteer is a heck of a lot lower for kicking out someone you're paying -- so anyone who shows up gets to make their own call on what their work to leisure ratio should look like, what sorts of heavy lifting their back can't handle, how often they need to use the bathroom, etc. And the meals still get done. (Granted: in my experience there's not much of a mechanism for being held accountable by the community being served, except to the extent that the community being served and the volunteer workers overlap to some degree. And as Food Not Bombs tends to hardcore refuse any sort of asking for legal permission, there's also no health and safety type audits from the government, which means it's solely on the volunteers to actually keep things safe, which can be a hit or miss proposition.) I can certainly imagine that if everything ran that way there'd be a lot of situations where you need a higher level of commitment than "sure, show up whenever and do what you feel like." (I've had volunteer positions that required a higher level of commitment than "sure, show up whenever and do what you feel like.") So I don't think evaluation and feedback on how you're doing, including "yeah we