A lesson in business – Do you really know what your people are required to do?

By C. Keller — In collaboration with The Productivity Rag

There are trips you make for work, and then there are the trips that make you work differently. This one started as the first kind, a global hunt for the best preventative maintenance practices across scattered factories done by their quiet, persistent experts. The goal was simple: find the places where technicians weren’t just doing maintenance but elevating it. Document those practices. Catalog them. Then, build something better as standard  for all sites from the sum of every site’s unique brilliance.

But in an overseas electrical interstitial, the kind where the air itself felt engineered, the purpose shifted.

The visit was supposed to be routine. The best practice observation process was simple: “Don’t mind us, we are just here to observe your PM procedures.” One of the first PMs was for a switchgear breaker, which had to be racked out for removal and then racked back in for installation. Racking out was done so the breaker could be inspected, trip tested and cleaned. Straightforward, I said to myself. Then the technician arrived, carrying not the calm of routine but the unmistakable weight of dread. Even before the procedure began, his face told a fuller truth than any maintenance log ever could.

He didn’t start with a tool.
He started with an arc-flash suit.

Two work buddies stepped in behind him, almost ritualistically, laying out caution tape in a twenty-foot radius. Then they escorted the observer (me) past that boundary with the same gravity you’d use when clearing a blast zone. And suddenly, the words “preventative maintenance” felt uncomfortably literal. The quiet confidence that normally accompanies good PM work was replaced by something else: fear wrapped in routine.

The technician suited up.
He breathed.
He approached the switchgear unit.
And the room held its breath with him.

Then-snap, he hit the disconnect switch.

Nothing happened.
No explosion.
No flash.
Just a successful, uneventful procedure — the kind that fills reports as a checkmark and a timestamp.

But the moment wasn’t over.

Walking away, there was no relief. Only the lingering, acidic realization: This is a practice we subject our technicians to?  That a company could accept a process that demanded courage normally reserved for firefighters and soldiers, and call it routine maintenance?

In the follow-up review meeting, surrounded by the technician, my team, and local managers, the weight on my heart wouldn’t go away. The words came out before the mind could negotiate them:

“I’m sorry.”

Not for causing it. But for witnessing it. For representing the system that allowed it. For the unspoken message that danger was acceptable if it fit neatly in a schedule.

The next morning, the technician arrived with a small gift: a jar of corn-syrup-free peanut butter, a thoughtful response to a complaint I’d made about the hotel’s breakfast bar. A small, but meaningful kindness. A human connection forged inside a larger system that hadn’t earned it. And perhaps that contrast made the vow, unspoken until then, settle deeper:

This has to change.

And as the global tour continued, the vow came along. It gnawed at me, during quiet moments, in airports, taxis, lobbies, and empty conference rooms, the way unresolved truths do. Until during a visit to another factory, thousands of miles away, a revelation of something new: a robot being piloted to perform the same dangerous step while the technician stood in control beyond the same 20 foot safety perimeter.

No tension.
No tape.
No fire suit.
No fear.

Just a machine doing a job no human should have been ever asked to shoulder.

It didn’t matter that the robot vendor was small or untested. It didn’t matter that the cost would make procurement wince. It didn’t matter that the solution wasn’t fully polished. What mattered was that it was right. And right carries its own gravity.

Documentation quickly followed. Then analysis. Then a case compelling enough to move through the typical slow gears of corporate decision-making. It wasn’t easy. We made it through quickly, though. Persistence, backed by a moral compass that already made up its mind, eventually wins.

The robot became the new best practice.
Every factory adopted it.
The vow, made quietly in a room full of hazard tape, was finally honored.

And productivity? It followed the EEF = P logic cleanly:
Efficiency rose because risk decreased.
Effectiveness improved because precision increased.
Fulfillment surged because people felt valued…and safer.

Sometimes preventative maintenance isn’t about machines at all.
Sometimes it’s about preventing harm, preventing fear, and preventing a company from slowly eroding its own people.

And sometimes, just sometimes, doing the right thing earns you more than trust.
It earns you a jar of really good peanut butter.

Edited and polished in collaboration with the AI Editorial Assistant of The Productivity Rag

© 2025 The Productivity Rag · Human insight, AI craftsmanship.