Have you ever started at a new job, read the employee handbook or handover documents from your predecessor and thought “Weird. Why do they do things like that?”

Over time, it’s natural that you will have tweaked your work to do it your way – particularly if you came in and immediately knew of a better way of doing things. That’s completely normal, since fresh pairs of eyes mean fresh input, and if you’re an expert in your field – or have a wealth of previous experience – your way of doing things will likely enhance what your predecessor did.

Most workplaces embrace this, and accept that new people bring change, and that’s almost always a good thing. However, other places are more resistant and set in their ways. Perhaps they like the way things were done before, or lack the ability to see how things would change for the better. And when you know that things aren’t being done in the best way at all, it can be incredibly frustrating.

That’s exactly the position that the guy in this story was put into when his manager insisted that his team go back to the official way of doing things, instead of following a much more efficient and effective method that they’d developed themselves over time. But when they returned to protocol, the difference was plain to see.

Read on to find out what happened here.

Manager math: three times three isn’t nine

One of my early jobs was in the screen department of a CRT factory.

Here, various chemical mixes were dribbled, sprayed or poured into a screen (the front four inches of a glass picture tube) sloshed, spun or otherwise spread, then the excess was dumped or spun out and collected to be reclaimed, adjusted and reused for the next batch.

For one chemical, the official process was to top it off with new, mix it for twenty minutes, then if needed adjust based on the viscosity measurement you just took.

After every adjustment, another twenty minutes of mixing before measuring again. This needed to be done before the previous batch ran out.

But the employees realised that there were better ways of doing this.

We quickly learned that extra water was always needed, and you could fairly easily predict the size of the adjustment before measuring anything based on the pencil and paper graph of previous test results.

Our procedure became top off, add about three litres of water depending on the graph results from previous batches, mix, test and send. This resulted in a mix that was near center spec every time.

That was until an important manager with a degree watched me do a mix, and started ranting “You didn’t measure, you’re adding too much water, you should never add water unless the mix was out of spec, there’s too much water, you’re going to ruin the mix, only add water when it’s out of spec, follow the procedure.”

I asked if he was really asking me to add nine litres of water every third tank instead of three litres every tank, he confirmed. I told him that this increased the risk of running dry and causing a batch of defects, he said “I’ll take that risk, but you better not sandbag”.

Read on to find out what happened next.

It turns out that the people who run the process can make it run fine either thick or thin, but not when it changes from thick to thin every hour or two then ramps back to thick.

It also turns out that if something goes even slightly wrong on the previous shift they may not leave you forty minutes of mix time and ten minutes of measurement time before the previous tank goes dry.

The good news was that we were able to get a version of the smart way adopted as official.

We were then allowed to control the process using statistics, just like we were taught in our mandatory Statistical Process Control training.

Sometimes you have to accept that the workers know the processes better than those who aren’t doing them every day.

And in this case, it meant that the staff doing the mixing were well aware of how things worked best, and that wasn’t by the book.

Sure the manager would likely come under fire if things went wrong, but that’s more reason for him to be pushing for the changes to protocol to actually make things better.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a person who spent nearly 3 decades climbing the ladder at work only to be fired in a meeting that lasted less than a minute.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person agreed that it’s common for employees to not do things ‘by the book’.

While others gave examples that showed the workers were doing things the smart way.

Meanwhile, this Redditor had examples of workers making things better using their own initiative.

The very fact that protocols have now been amended shows quite clearly just how much better the workers’ way of mixing was. And the fact that the manager was so insistent on them doing things by the book – while technically correct, and avoiding him getting into trouble – is just another example of managers who don’t understand their employees’ jobs, but try to dictate the way they do things anyway.

There would be nothing wrong with him saying ‘okay guys, I need you to do it the way protocol states otherwise I’ll get into trouble, but I’ll push to get protocol changed to your way’. But of course, that would require him actually having considered his workers’ method, rather than just insisting they do it his way. Because the components (nine litres of water) haven’t changed. All that has changed is the order of it being added to the mix – with the official way making it much worse overall.

It pays to listen to your workers – in this case, quite literally.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman whose HR department advised her to quit if she was that unhappy, so she did and found herself in a role reversal years later.