Here are the comments made on the "What do you think?" quiz this week:

1 Too many bureaucrats overseeing permits, reporting & procedures and creating gridlock for operators, maintenance and line staff

2 I believe there are some people in established positions that are not providing value for what they are paid which would imply we are overstaffed. However, there is value in having more people working on process improvement opportunities which it seems we have trouble finding the time for those resources to concentrate on those things. In other words, we are not overstaffed but need to rearrange the staff to work on the most valuable opportunities.

3 Probably like most places, there are areas that are overstaffed and some that are understaffed. Hopefully, making better use of leadership skills will change this, and once this is done, improved operations will result. Now, I disagree that workers (and by the way it was written seemed to imply middle and lower management and hourly labor) are taking on a government attitude to working for full employment. This would be more of where is the incentive to do anything that results in my financial hardship while someone else will be rewarded, not for leading the enterprise as a whole so each member can and does deliver more value, but instead can only figure out how to slow down the check writer, which is pretty damn easy to do.

4 The president believes he has to have a certain entourage in the main office.

5 While I was not a mill employee, but in a business technical support role, I am no longer employed. However, I do know that the UFS mills I supported are very lean and have been for some time.

6 Not a very easy question to answer this way, but if the mill can continue to successfully operate without somebody then that person is excess staff. Starting at the president/mill manager and working down.

7 Too much overhead, too little direct thinking

8 In general, no. However we are in certain areas. The fundamental areas of engineering, process, and development are severely understaffed while areas such as accounting are, in my opinion, overstaffed. For example, I'm the Technical Director responsible for technical, product dev., environmental, quality, field tech support, and assisting Ops with day to day process issues. I have one person - an Env. Eng. - helping me. We have plenty of people to count the red beans brought on by lack of effectiveness in the key fundamental areas.

9 When I started at this mill the staff was 360 peoples and today we are 290 and 729 days since last LTI. That’s basic and means we work with safety and common value-system.

10 There are, however, resources that are under-utilized for various excuses.

11 If anything we are understaffed. Most of us non-shift salaried folks are working 10+ hours/day and covering on-call on weekends for 8 hours pay and no bonuses or very small ones. There's little paper industry left in our area or I suspect more of us would be leaving.

12 difficult to reduce headcount [and maintain product qualities] without some further investment. For example, one current project will reduce headcount by 1.5%; it will pay off in 6 months.

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