The difference is night and day and makes the difference in day to day operations. Endulge me if you with aneditocal evidence. Think I spelled that wrong.
I work in manufacturing, steel forging and machinery. I work in the forge, same forge that's been there since 1962, newest equipment was installed in 2002. This will be your typical story of workers begging for long term fixes but management only paying for bandaids decade after decade because it's too expensive. Yet we can pay to keep fixing it every couple of years. Anyway everything breaks, often, so our limited maintenance team is putting out fires more than they should. I work weekend shift, we have 1 maintenance guy and one lead. Combined they have 13 years experience. To compare, dayshift has combined experience of 160+ years, we have collectively 18. We don't have the leadership required to make smart decisions quickly and efficiently to ensure production remains high.
For context here are some numbers. 4 weeks ago our shift put up an average of a 48% productivity. 3 weeks it's was at 36%. We have been struggling with the machines breakin, not having orders, being forced to do indirect work that doesn't apply to production. Our supervisor has 13 years in the company, and can't run a single machine or help in any capacity. 2 weeks ago a veteran was voluntold to help us. Great guy knows everything there is to know. Guess what yall, this dude was on the floor helping us and motivating us. Right there with us in the insane heat working with us. 2 weekends ago our numbers climbed to a 72% just like that!
Here is where it gets fun! This past weekend our supervisor was out on vacation. It was just us, the veteran and 1 additional maintenance man. Yall we averaged at 98%!! We set company records of daily production rates of 100% the difference is clear, having a leader instead of a boss.
A leader will motivate you and push you, while you follow because you respect the fact they been through what you going through. You work hard. Our supervisor bragged about a record of 8 write ups in 3 weeks. I got the first write up in my life, for being 5 minutes late from break. Our supervisor threatens us with write ups, a lot. So much that we passively ensure we keep numbers low take downtime when we can. We are used and abused. Lied to and gaslit. We all expect it, they money is good that's why we do this hard work while management wrong decisions like it was a challenge.