56. Complacency

Griffin is joined by his son Isaac to talk about complacency in the workplace and how we combat it.

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SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to Loaded, the Hahn Ready Mix Podcast. I'm Griffin Hahn and joined here by producer Lex and Isaac Hahn. How are you, Isaac? Good. Good? Well, welcome to the podcast. What are you doing here at work today? Why are you here?

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Um, because of spring break.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

It's spring break and you don't have school?

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Ah, okay. Well, I suppose that's a pretty good reason. Are you gonna be here all week or are we going somewhere?

SPEAKER_00 0:39

We're going to Florida tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Oh, that'll be fun. We're gonna go see uh Nana and Grandpa and Grammy.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

And our cousins.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

And your cousins. Perfect. Well, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Andrea is already on spring break, so she skipped out on us today. But we got producer lexed, so we're good. I have a couple announcements. I know everyone's eagerly awaiting the standings of the March Madness bracket, but since we're recording this midweek before it comes out, we don't have any of that information yet. So next week, we'll always be a week behind on announcing that. Next week we will do that. Other thing I wanted to talk about, we've chatted a number of times on here about idling trucks and how that's not good for the engines and uh why we should not do that. Well, there's another reason now uh why we shouldn't do it, and that is that diesel fuel costs are skyrocketing. About 33% over since where they were about a year ago. So it's just another reason we don't want to idle the truck. So if you're sitting for a while, please shut the truck off. That is my announcement. Isaac, what do you want to talk about today?

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Uh I forgot.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

You forgot? You were supposed to come up with the topic.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

No, you were.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Oh, okay. All right. One of the things I wanted to chat about today, or the thing I wanted to chat about today, was complacency. I think we've spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about the things that we do well and how proud I am and we all are of where we've come as an organization and and our capabilities and the standards we set. And all of that is true. All of that is 100% true. I am very confident and and excited about where this group is going. But that kind of success comes with risk. And that risk is complacency. Isaac, do you do you know what complacency is?

SPEAKER_00 2:37

No. What is complacency?

SPEAKER_01 2:40

It's almost like you rehearsed that line. So complacency is when you know you're feeling self-satisfied or like you've you've done enough and you don't have to keep putting in the effort. Do you ever have that happen, Isaac, where you're complacent?

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Yeah? Never do that. And I'm like, well, if you don't keep working on it, you're never gonna be even better soccer player, huh? Yeah. So complacency can come in all facets of our life. We definitely don't want it to happen here. It tends to happen when things are going well. It tends to happen when people are experienced and when systems are working. And I would say that that describes us for the most part. You know, it's been a slower economic experience over the last like two and a half years. From that perspective, things haven't gone well, but they've allowed us to be very detailed and take our time and do things right. Uh, it's more easy to do things right in that situation. So things have been going well. The complacency happens when you kind of stop paying attention to the details that made you successful in the per first place. And I don't think this is happening, but we had some signs of this over the last week, uh, some things that went wrong that I just wanted to make sure we're nipping it in the bud now instead of letting it kind of fester or grow into a bigger problem. What do you think, Isaac?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Mm-hmm.

unknown 4:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Thanks. What that's looked like in the last couple weeks, where where have we had potentially signs of complacency? We've had loads of concrete rejected because drivers didn't check their loads, right? So that's one of the things, one of the expectations we have, that every single load gets checked before it leaves the yard. Mostly for slump accuracy, right? If a customer wants a five-inch slump, we certainly should not leave the yard with an eight-inch slump. Or if they want an eight-inch slump, we certainly shouldn't shouldn't leave with a five-inch slump. So making sure that we are giving the customers what they want is the first thing. But also, there are times when something doesn't go right in the batch plant, and the driver looking at the load is the last line of defense, right? So making sure that it looks like concrete. We've had it happen where we've had contamination and there was no rock, the rock bin, there was sand, and then we had a load of concrete with no rock in it. And if we can catch that at the plant, you know, that is a much better situation than sending that out to a customer. The drivers are the last line of defense on checking loads. So yeah, so we've had some instances of that happening over the last week where we didn't have drivers checking loads. We've had some dispatch order entry mistakes where we didn't put orders in correctly and have burned our customers a little bit on that. We've had drivers leaving hoppers up and running into stuff, damaging plants and equipment. Obviously, that's expensive and takes up time and interrupts production. We've got to be better about that. And I do see folks driving around with the hoppers up quite a bit. And those hoppers are great for unloading low slump concrete, but we've got to be cognizant of the position they're in after we wash out and making sure we're not driving around town because it's easy to get a hopper that's up snagged on a telephone wire or something like that. We've had some instances of poor communication between our drivers and dispatch. This is definitely a two-way street. We had we had a not good situation last week where a load was rejected and then there was confusion on whether they were actually going to pour the load or not, and so we didn't rebatch that load. So the customer was waiting for the concrete to show up for a couple hours, and we did not know in dispatch that they wanted that load. And so that's kind of a nightmare scenario. And all it would have taken on either side is a phone call to double check. Did that load actually get rejected? Are they using it? Do they want another one from the driver's side? You know, hey, I they thought they were gonna use it and they didn't. That is a completely avoidable situation. The extra phone call could have could have saved a bad experience there for our customer. You know, we had concrete rejected for for high air, so making sure that we're being diligent on testing everything, and I gotta own some of that one. I went out and added too much air minus on on that and didn't save the loads. So, you know, uh it certainly all of these things, there's never any bad intention with any of this, but it certainly felt like at the end of last week we weren't shining in a way that we could. So in a way that we expect to do, and our customers expect of us. Yeah, we just want to nip this in the bud, and if it is complacency, then let's change it. Let's talk a little bit. Isaac, what's confidence? Do you know what confidence is? Yes. What are you confident about? Uh I'd say you're a pretty confident talker. You like to talk.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

You can talk about anything, huh? Confidence says we know what we're doing. And I think everyone here deserves to be confident, right? Complacency says we don't need to check anymore. That's a spot where I don't ever want us to be, where we are not double checking our work. So the cost of complacency for for us is could be rejected loads, could be safety incidents, could be equipment breakdowns and lost time, and it could be lost customers. And all of those things are things we desperately want to avoid. Making sure we double check our work is really important. So how do we fight complacency, right? Some ideas are we treat every single load, whether it's we're putting in an order and dispatch or we are hauling a load of concrete or even hauling, you know, raw materials. We treat it like it's our first, right? The care and the attention we pay to the first time we do something because you're nervous, you're unsure. If we can kind of put ourselves into that mindset of, you know, I've got to be this careful every time, that'll that'll serve us well. We need to double check even when we're sure. Yeah? So it kind of like when you're working on reading. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

I always double check.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

You always double check, you sound the words out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

And I'm like, what? This doesn't sound like it.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Okay, good. So we can double check even when we're sure. And that's kind of like that incident uh I talked about a little bit ago. We, you know, it just took one more phone call and and we could have prevented it. We need to stay curious. We've talked about this before, but it's kind of a Ted Lasso line.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

But I'm always curious.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

You are very curious, yes. You ask me a million questions a day. Staying curious is uh great life philosophy in general, but being curious means that we won't assume that we know everything that is going on and that we need to be open to challenging what we think or challenging what we are seeing, right? And so I think that that is an important way to fight complacency. I think speaking up when something feels off is important. There's a lot of times when something negative will happen and somebody says, Well, I wondered about that. And you know, if we communicate with each other and we say, hey, this load doesn't look right, or this, you know, if the customer calls in and says they want something and we don't really understand it, or or we want clarification, then let's ask the extra extra question. So uh speak up when we're when we're confused. So those those are some ways we can fight complacency. And I I'd like to challenge everyone to kind of review yourself and how you go through your day and how can you fight complacency and what you do? And and a simple way is what's one thing you're gonna double check tomorrow that you usually don't do not, right? I don't know what that looks like for everybody, but if everybody double checks one thing, maybe one thing different every day, but they normally don't double check, we're gonna be a whole lot better for it. Like Isaac, you could double check. Do you have your water bottle with you every time you go somewhere? Because you like to leave it places, don't you?

SPEAKER_00 11:20

Yeah, I yeah. I just forget.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

You forget, yeah. Well, that's some complacency, huh?

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Yeah. All right, well, I think that's it for today. Isaac, you got anything else you want to talk about?

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Nope.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Alright, well, thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Alrighty. Well, that's it for us today. Thanks for listening to Loaded, the Hon ReadyMix podcast, and we'll catch you next time. Oh, what was the Chinese goodbye you were gonna do, Lex?