Work and Worship

Here’s the deal. This post has two parts that connect more than you might expect. The first is a story about what I told a contractor about organizing a maintenance shop. The second is a conversation from a panel about work and worship, and what it means to love hard work without burning people out. Both come back to the same idea. The places and habits we build around work should be remarkable.

Short answer: To organize a Lean maintenance shop, map the shop’s capacity to your maintenance need, organize around value streams instead of departments, set up bays to match them, time the work through each bay and fix the bottlenecks, then 5S, eliminate waste, and create standard work. Every area should be remarkable, a place people want to work.

A Quick Update From Our Own Shop

Brandon Montero works with us full-time now, and he is jamming out and doing so many cool Lean improvements to our shop. The trailer has been leaned out. Boot camp has been leaned out. Our fabrication area has been leaned out. We are a million miles away from where we need to be, but it is so fun to work in an environment that is standardized and stable, with visual work.

It is starting to happen for us at Lean Logistics, where we manufacture and assemble things, and we are going to do it out on the job at LeanBuilt as well. It set the stage for a conversation I had with a contractor in New Mexico.

How Do You Organize a Lean Maintenance Shop?

I went to visit a contractor in New Mexico, and I want to be clear that they are really smart people. They invited me into their shop and asked what I would encourage them to do. Their shop maintains lots of equipment, lots of trucks, and large equipment. Here is what I told them, as best I can remember it.

• Map the capacity of the shop to the need of your maintenance. Total up all the different types of pieces you have throughout the company and look at their maintenance intervals. AI can help with this. Then look at how much of that maintenance is done mobile, out in the field, and how many of those pieces of equipment actually come into the shop.
• Look at your value streams. A lot of times companies silo and organize by department, convenience, or leader. Usually in Lean thinking, it is best to organize around value streams, market segments, customers served, or product types.
• Organize your shop, by location and by bay, to accommodate those value streams or clusters.
• Once that is organized, start timing everything that moves through those bays and find out where the bottlenecks are. Optimize the bottlenecks.
• Then standardize, eliminate waste, and improve. Once you have your bays organized, go through and 5S, eliminate the waste, create standard work for literally everything, and improve from there.

Value Streams and Bays

Instead of organizing a company into business development, finance, pre-construction, construction, warranty, and commissioning, all separate and sub-optimized, perhaps we should have all of those players in a cluster around a single project, market, or customer, so there is flow through the value stream. For the shop, that means asking whether you spend most of your time maintaining large equipment, small equipment, or trucks. If you do very little large equipment maintenance, but you have three large equipment bays and only one truck bay and one small equipment bay, then you do not have your location mapped by value stream.

The Order Matters

Mapping capacity to need reduces overburden. Finding and optimizing bottlenecks reduces unevenness. Then you standardize, eliminate waste, and improve.

There Should Not Be a Place in the Shop That Is Not Remarkable

The point I made at the end is that there should not be anywhere in the shop that is not remarkable. Marie Kondo had this right: keep what sparks joy. Picture the opposite. You go stand in an area, and it is nasty, dirty, dark, and cold. Tools are everywhere. You have to get up off your cold, old knees and go grab a tool that is somewhere in the dirt or the oil absorbent, and you look through dusty, dirty drawers.

Now picture what it could be.

• A piece of equipment comes in, and there is a hydraulic lift, if the equipment is capable, and it is really easy to service.
• You have rolling chairs you can sit on and scoot around to do the lower-level maintenance.
• You have steps to go up and maintain higher areas.
• You have gang boxes and drawers with standardized tools that are all cut out in Lean foam, so you know where everything is supposed to go.
• Your tools are on lanyards, so they are right there.
• Your workstation is beautiful, clean, and remarkable, and you say, I like working in here.
• Everything you look at is visual from ten feet away, and everything is five and five. In five seconds, and five steps away, you can access anything you need.

There is a standard for literally everything. Who would not want to work in that kind of environment? Everything should bring you joy.

For more on building standard work, see Stability & Standardization.

The Panel and the Question of Calling

Now for the second part. I was at the Lean Solutions Global Summit, a really neat event, and I was honored to be a keynote speaker. I had six, seven, eight months to prepare, so I nailed it, because I had experts helping me get everything ready. I also got to be on a panel where we were asked what advice we would give anybody growing up, just one bit of advice.

Mine was kind of silly, but here it is. Whether it is God, the universe, the collective consciousness, pantheism, or whatever it is out there, something out there is talking to us. Find out from that thing, entity, wisdom, knowledge, or enlightenment what your specific calling is in life. Then go do it without restraint. Give it your all, have some fun, really live this life, and fulfill the measure of your creation, for lack of a better way of saying it.

What Does Work as Worship Mean?

The other keynote speakers liked that. But the one that I want to talk about is what the speaker after me said. He said that if you look in the scriptures at the word work, some of the original Greek and Hebrew translations tie the word work to worship as well. I think he was also a preacher, and he did a good job. He said he has always thought of work in line with worship, that when he is working, he is worshiping God.

You can extend that. When I am working, I am serving humanity and the well-being of others. Sometimes I do not dig stuff like that, but for some reason I liked it.

But You Talk About Balance

It brings me to something that somebody once said to me. Jason, you talk a lot about balance, and about blessing people’s lives with balance, but you work so hard and you work so much. I thought it would be a neat thing to talk about.

I am mainly trying to unburden the workers and foremen in the field. I am assembling research into a book, using AI tools along with my own thoughts and human wisdom, about how to help the human brain be more Lean. One chapter talks about how injury risk climbs sharply after a certain number of hours, after a certain time in the day, when we are doing shift work, when the body has not eaten, and when we do not have the right systems to support our environment.

The point is that the following all raise the chance of injury or accident.

• Working harder.
• Not having eaten.
• Working overtime.
• Working shifts through the whole night.

I am trying to prevent accidents and injuries for a group of people who are at higher risk because of their circumstances. We also have to loop in project delivery teams, even if they do not have physical injuries, from a mental health standpoint. If you are super stressed out all the time, you are not getting what you need, you are working a bunch of overtime, you are away from your families, and you are in chaotic, stressful, toxic environments, you need to be protected as well.

So I talk about team balance and health. I talk about personal organization systems. I talk about making sure we take our PTO, go to the doctor, and take care of ourselves. That gives you a really good base. If you do those things well and you follow Getting Things Done by David Allen, you will be highly effective.

Why I Love Work

What I am talking about, though, is that I love working because I want to. I love working in positive environments. I love working on passion projects. I like working when I am being creative, when it works, when I am staying ahead, advancing, and growing. If you watched me in my natural environment, you would see that I have a fantastic time working.

Here is my typical routine when I am not on a job site or consulting. I get up at about six o’clock and spend the time until about 7:45 helping the family get out the door. I work until about 3:30, hang out with the family, and then work another two hours from about 6:30 to 8:30. When I am consulting, it is pretty much six to six. On a job site, it ends up being about five to four.

Those are not crazy hours, but I work very hard, I am very focused, and I am very productive. Because I am so organized, I am able to grind and do some really cool things to elevate my family, myself, and humanity.

Never Anti-Work

I am never anti-work. I am a hardworking person to the core, and I absolutely love it. I probably will never retire. I will probably work until the day I die. I just want to make sure nobody ever gets a false impression of what I am trying to say. I love work and I love hard workers. People who are not putting in the time, and who are not focused when they are here, have not made it in our company, and that will always be the way it is, because that is who we are. We grind and we serve because we are here to make a difference in life and to give.

So here is the challenge. Walk through your own shop, trailer, or jobsite, and ask whether every area is remarkable. Then ask whether the people working there are protected by good systems, good rest, and good food.

Bottom line: Everything should bring you joy.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

On we go.

FAQ

What are the five steps Jason gave the contractor for organizing a maintenance shop?

Map the shop’s capacity to the maintenance need, look at value streams, organize the shop by location and bay to match them, time everything through the bays and optimize the bottlenecks, and then standardize, eliminate waste, and improve with 5S and standard work.

Why organize by value stream instead of department?

Because separate departments are sub-optimized. Clustering the players around a project, a market, or a customer lets work flow through the value stream.

What does Jason mean by work as worship?

A panelist said that in the original Greek and Hebrew, the word for work is tied to worship. I extend that to working for humanity and the well-being of others, and I love work for that reason.

How does Jason reconcile loving hard work with caring about balance?

I am trying to unburden workers and foremen. I point to research showing higher injury risk from working harder, skipping meals, overtime, and night shifts, and I promote team balance, personal organization systems, taking PTO, and caring for your health.

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