 |
|
|
|||||
Becoming a manager for the first time can feel exciting, gratifying, nerve-wracking, and even overwhelming. But being a good boss is not about following a checklist of what makes a perfect manager, as theres no such thing, argues Sabina Nawaz in her book Youre the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need). A former HR leader at Microsoft and executive coach for Fortune 500 decision-makers, Nawaz offers actionable frameworks in her book on how to become a better manager, backed by lessons from her clients and personal career wins and losses. Here are some top takeaways from the book on how new managers can best make the transition. Being a good manager is a journey Its a common misconception that there are bad bosses and good ones, but according to Nawaz, we all have the capacity to teeter between good and bad boss behaviors. Just as no person is all good or all bad, the measure of a boss is neither binary nor fixed,” writes Nawaz. “‘Bad’ bosses are rarely bad people. In fact, most of them are good people with the best of intentions who unwittingly cross a tenuous dividing line between good intentions and bad behaviors. Acknowledging this can help you realize its an active practice to deliver skilled managementand quite common for negative habits to emerge if left unchecked. This mental shift of making continual progress towards productive behaviors and minimizing the emergence of lackluster ones often starts with reframing how you attain success. Your path to becoming a manager was likely the result of being an ambitious professional delivering beyond expectations, but thats no longer the case. Showcasing your output may be what got you where you are, but now you need to rewire who gets showcased and what ‘output’ means, writes Nawaz. Recalibrating to focus on driving your teams success is the critical distinction between being a standout employee and a standout boss. Its a continual effort as a manager to reorient how you were incentivized to perform before, and do your best to avoid the slow slip into bad boss behaviors, writes Nawaz. Communicate with greater precision Now that youre a manager, the power dynamics have shifted when it comes to how youre perceived by your colleagues. What you say, write, and do can carry more weight. Poor communication is the second most common perceived weakness of managers, according to Nawazs research. One of the most common mistakes is when managers give imprecise feedback or advice, resulting in a lack of clarity on appropriate next steps. This can lead to an overreaction like a colleague redesigning the entire pitch deck, when only one slide needed a revamp. Or too restrained of a response altogether. When youre a manager, the team often pays close attention to your every word, so Nawaz suggests using what she dubs the scaling tool to offset this pitfall and communicate with the intended level of impact and urgency. She suggests saying something like: On a scale of one to 10, Id rate the importance of this task at a . . . Or, in terms of a rough sketch vs. polished, this can be a . . . Or, On a scale of one to 10, how confident do you feel about your ability to deliver in the timeline given? Any professional could benefit from being a more calculated communicator by using the scaling tool, but it matters more when your team puts more weight to your message. Another common mistake among managers is giving uneven feedback or only offering corrective feedback about whats wrong and needs to be improved upon. Solely delivering negative feedback is demoralizing and harmful to a team members productivity when theyre not getting motivating insights into what is working. As human beings, we are wired to listen for the dangers, for the negatives, and dont take in the positive until its repeated endlessly like this weeks top song, writes Nawaz. She recommends managers offset this by offering five positive comments for every piece of corrective feedback, keeping the positive stuff more feedback than praise, and making the delivery of positive feedback a frequent habit. This is important: A Gallup survey found that employees rank the most meaningful and memorable recognition comes from their managers. Delegate effectively Now that youre a manager, you cant continue to do everything yourself like you did when you were an individual contributor. You have to delegate. Whats not obvious about delegating is how to do it successfully. You cant simply pass off tasks with a set of instructions and hope for results. According to Nawaz, delegation starts with identifying your direct reports level of knowledge on a given subject or task. The next step is adjusting your coaching so employees are given the right level of support and independence. Depending on how much support is needed, you could approach that in a number of ways. For instance, you could do the task and have them observe you, teach them the step-by-step process, ask what they need from you as they complete the task without your instruction, or make it clear youre a resource as they finalize the task on their own. These actions go in order of providing more coaching from you and less self-sufficiency initially to eventually scaling back your involvement and increasing their own autonomy to complete the task. Delegation is critical for not only empowering your team to grow and contribute to the organizations goals, but it also provides you with more blank space on your schedule for other tasks. Recognize your triggers that lead to bad boss behavior Youll be exposed to different sources of stress and pressure as a manager. Some is avoidable, but a lot of it is not. The buildup of these forces is typically what leads a well-intentioned manager to delegate poorly, communicate haphazardly, or come across as cold. To do your best to prevent a downward shift toward the bad boss lane, aim to control how you react to these strains by spotting the triggers that set you off. Nawaz refers to these as your pressure pitfalls, and the ability to identify them as theyre emerging can help you deescalate and change how you react in the moment. She suggests managers ask themselves these types of questions and keep note of the scenarios when these moments bubble up. What types of people tend to put me on high alert? What tends to get under my skin the most? What days of the week or cyclical or seasonal times are particularly pressure-filled for me? What do I experience physically when I get triggered? When are the moments I am not at my best? (When youre sleep-deprived? Hungry? In the mornings before youve had your coffee or late afternoons when your energy dips?) The answers you come up with can help you map your pressure-induced triggers and begin to adjust how you react through following a series of groundig exercises. Once a trigger is activated, Nawaz recommends doing complex math or thinking through a familiar memory to help direct the brain out of a flight or fight moment and back to executive functioning. To put this into practiceor any of these suggestionsNawaz advocates for creating a micro habit where you practice the skill daily and keep it small, so theyre tiny enough to sneak past our defense systems and start to inoculate us against change resistance. By small, she suggests so tiny that this habit takes two minutes or less a day, and may even feel absurdly minuscule on the surface, which means youre off to a strong start. Keep these management frameworks and recommendations in mind as you begin your journey of working to become a better boss for your team.
Category:
E-Commerce
Sometimes, being a leader means making tough callsones that arent popular, and sometimes even get misunderstood. Youve probably heard the saying, If everyone likes you, youre not really leading. Fair enough. But what do you do when you hear that no one wants to work with you? Maybe it comes up in passing from a colleague, or maybe it hits harder in a 360 review. Either way, that kind of feedback can sting. Its that gut-punch moment where you think, Wait . . . what? Youve been putting in the work, prioritizing the team (at least in your mind), but somehow people arent seeing it. They dont get the pressure youre under, the decisions youve had to make, or why things played out the way they did. Heres the hard truth: Perception is reality. You might feel like youre doing everything right, but if your team feels disconnected or frustrated, their experience is what matters most. Its time to pause, reflect, and figure out how things veered off course. No, its not fair. And no, you cant fix it overnight. But you can make a plan to rebuild trust, reconnect with your team, and start turning things aroundone step at a time. Get the data Yeah, this parts going to be uncomfortablebut if youve heard that no one wants to work with you, its time to figure out why. Youve got a couple of options. If you havent already done a 360 review, thats a good place to start. Or you can reach out to a trusted advisor or mentor and ask for some honest feedback. One thing you dont want to do? March straight over to your team and start digging for answers. Thatll likely come off as defensiveor worse, accusatoryand it wont help your case. Instead, talk to someone outside the situation. Ideally, someone who knows you well but isnt directly impacted by your leadership style. You want perspective, not more tension. I worked with one client whos a strong, passionate leaderbut sometimes that passion got the best of him. For instance, when his team would present him with ideas, my client would shout them down if he thought those ideas wouldnt work. His team felt overwhelmed, and eventually no one wanted to work with him. My client wasnt aware of the pattern and had no idea his team felt so discouraged. His 360 revealed to him how much his reactions were demoralizing his team; my client learned to soften his delivery, slow down, and listen more. Say sorry Before you can really move forward, youve got to clean up some of the mess behind you. That means taking a hard look at the feedback you got and asking yourself: To whom do I owe an apology? You dont need to deliver a grand speech or make it weirdjust keep it simple and sincere. Something like: Eric, Im sorry for how Ive handled things in the past. I lost my cool and yelled, and I know that wasnt okay. I hope we can move forward and focus on doing great work together. Thats it. One apology, no over-explaining, no revisiting it later. Say it, mean it, and then move on. The goal isnt to dwellits to rebuild. Create a plan for moving forward After youve gathered data and said sorry to folks, it’s time to develop a structured, daily plan for how youll treat your teammates. Here are some ideas for elements to include in that plan, which you can refine based on your specific needs: Say “good morning” every day. On Mondays, ask how your team members weekends were. Ahead of difficult conversations, set aside planning time. Practice the interaction so you aren’t left winging it (thats a recipe for saying something youll later regret). Good is good enoughremind yourself of this maxim. Rather than shoot for perfect, identify what is 80%, or “good enough.” Write down what this looks like for your particular projects, as well as how youll reward your team for a job well done. If you have an upcoming meeting with peers who trigger you to yell and be disrespectful, create a plan for how youll mitigate that impulse (for example, “I will take three deep breaths before responding to Alex”). Plan to share a “thank you” and “good job” to someone at least two times a week. Dont be afraid to write down the details of the plan, no matter how trivial they may seem. Getting a plan in writing means youre more likely to follow through. Be consistent If youre trying to turn over a new leaf as a manager, just knowyour team is going to be cautious at first. Theyll be watching to see if this is the real deal or just a phase. One offhand comment or outburst and they’ll be thinking, Yep, there it is. Knew it wouldnt last. Its not because theyre rooting against youits because theyve been burned before. Thats why its so important to make sure your actions match your words. If you say youre changing but then fall back into old habits, it creates confusion and makes people feel unsafe. So take the time to prepareespecially for tough moments. Got a difficult conversation coming up? Map it out first. Think through what you want to say and how you want to say it. Yes, its more work upfront. But it helps lay the groundwork for real trustand thats what will make your new leadership style stick. Just remember: This is a long game, not a quick fix. Playing the long game is difficult when you want a quick win. I worked with one client who wanted things with her team to turn around right away. However, changing a behavior is never easy; this client had to continually focus on and practice a new way of speaking to her team. My client was frustrated with the amount of effort she had to put toward this new communication style. When she had slipups and reverted back to her old style, she felt as if she were starting from square one each time. I continually reminded this client that change takes time. She had many conversations with her manager in which she shared her management plan and the results she was getting. The manager served as a support system to my client as she implemented the changes. It’s hard to hear that no one wants to work with you, but you can turn the ship around. Remember that your team members are people first. Say “sorry” where you need to, treat people with respect, and make a concrete plan to be less reactive moving forward.
Category:
E-Commerce
It doesnt take long for Christer Collin and Ola Wihlborg to assemble the newest credenza from Ikea. Collin is a 42-year veteran of the company, specializing in product development. Wihlborg is one of the companys most senior designers, having created dozens of pieces of furniture sold by the retailer since 2004. The two Swedes are lifting parts and turning hex wrenches in a second-floor conference room in Trnava, Slovakia, just outside the capital, Bratislava. This is where Inter Ikea Group (one of two Ikea parent companies) operates one of its more than 30 furniture and furnishings factories through its subsidiary, Ikea Industry, and where a sizable number of the retailers most commonly purchased items materialize.The credenza is one of Wihlborgs own creations, and it has just come off the line of the sprawling factory downstairs. As he works, hes barely consulting the detailed paper assembly manual familiar to anyone whos put together a piece of Ikea furniture. I can do it without, but its always nice to see the instructions, Wihlborg says between sips of coffee, a model of Scandinavian cool in a black baseball cap and T-shirt. He has the design of the piece deeply ingrained in his brain after a three-year development process thats brought it from concept to commercialization. Collin is an Ikea supply innovator whose job is to streamline how the company designs its furniture for customer assembly, and hes visited dozens of Ikea factories and suppliers throughout his career. He can build with surgical precision. And because of the unique way Ikea has come to be such a dominant and global-scale furniture retailer, Wihlborg and Collin also know pretty much exactly how this credenza has been produced, down to the milling of the rails for its sliding doors and the location of the dowels that hold its sides in place.[Photo: Ikea]To a degree, most of Ikeas 899 million annual customers probably dont appreciate how the making of a piece of furniture like this credenza is a finely calibrated dance involving design, manufacturing, packaging, and assembly, with each element influencing the others in equal measure. Ikeas designers must know how to make a piece of furniture, but also how it will be produced en masse, how it will end up on a shipping pallet, and how an untrained consumer can put it together without ripping their hair out.This interrelated process is the Ikea way, dating back to its world-changing leap into the self-assembled furniture business in 1952, and foundational to its global success. At the end of its 2024 fiscal year, Ikea parent company Ingka Group reported annual retail sales of 39.5 billion euro, or roughly $44.8 billion. Its share of the $940 billion global home furnishings market is a remarkable 5.7%. More than 727 million people visited its stores in 2024. It used about 473 million cubic feet of wood for its products, a figure thats often compared to about 1% of the wood consumed around the world per year. As a company, it is an undeniable global force.Its also been uncommonly influential in the business world. Though it did not invent flat-pack furniture, also known as knockdown furniture, it has so thoroughly saturated the market that all its biggest competitors, from Wayfair to Walmart, must do the same. Flat-pack furniture represents an $18 billion global market, a market many analysts expect to grow more than 50% over the next decade.Wihlborg and Collin have Ikeas design-manufacturing-packaging-assembly calculus hardwired into their brains. Within 24 minutes of opening the credenzas two boxes, they have the piece fully built. And though Wihlborg has run this design through his mind countless times over roughly three years of developmentwith concepts, prototypes, factory adjustments, revisions, and tiny tweakshe had to come to this Slovakian factory to unbox and build the final product. Its actually my first time, Wihlborg says, smiling.[Image: Ikea]Inside Ikeas factoryEverywhere you look across the cavernous floor of Ikea Industrys Trnava factory there is particleboard, often standing several feet high, and in hundreds and hundreds of stacks. Piled on racks that traverse the factorys football-field-length halls on a network of rolling steel conveyors, these precisely processed cuts of particleboard come in a variety of densities and more than 20 different base dimensions. They get worked by hand, machine, and, increasingly, robot, to transform into the building blocks of some of Ikeas best-selling shelves, tables, and chairs. Through a nearly scientific process, theyve been refined to the size and form that simultaneously fit the intentions of the design concept, the capacities of the factorys equipment, and the confines of a cardboard box a typical consumer can lift into the back of a car.The Trnava factory is one of Ikeas flat-pack furniture powerhouses, running around the clock with 500 workers, three eight-hour shifts, and an active floor covering more than half a million square feettwice the size of a typical Ikea store. It pumps out about 25,000 pieces of furniture every week. Its warehouses are stacked with assembly-ready boxes filled with Billy bookcases, Tonstad storage cabinets, and Hemnes bed frames.[Image: Ikea]Since October, the Trnava factory has also been producing about a dozen of the furniture pieces that make up Stockholm 2025, Ikeas newest line of high-end furnishings, including Wihlborgs credenza, which retails for $400. Its path through the factoryfrom raw particleboards to milled and veneered pieces to flat-packed final productis a case study in the ways design, production, and packaging cross-pollinate to create the Ikea products that end up in homes all over the world.[Photo: Ikea]Its a process that starts with one of those stacks of particleboard. Workers in rubber gloves move wide rectangular boards onto a work surface, where one lays down a line of glue and the other mallets a strip of solid oak into a narrow slit. This piece will be the base of the credenza, and the length of solid wood will soon be sawed and milled with tiny channels for the credenzas sliding doorsa higher-quality detail than the tacked-on plastic or aluminum rails that might be used in lower-cost products.[Image: Ikea]The credenzas baseboard then heads off to another station, where a worker spends a full shift guiding close to 800 baseboards through a sanding machine that makes the glued oak piece exactly flush with the rest of the board. At the same time, a massive saw machine cuts down large sheets of particleboard to component size, before being automatically sorted and grouped for further processing. [Photo: Ikea]The sideboards, the interior shelves, the bottom supports, and the top all get cut and stacked and moved down the line. Pneumatic machines with grids of suction cups lift individual boards onto conveyor belts where theyre sprayed with glue, topped with wood veneer, and pushed into the hiss of a heated pressure machine. After seven seconds, they come out the other end with an aesthetically pleasing hardwood look, despite their cheaper and lighter particleboard innards. After edge shaving in one machine, another machine hot glues a strip of veneer around their perimeters, covering any hint of the base material inside.[Photo: Ikea]These processes are being done in rapid, automated succession via complicated machines that are bigger than some peoples apartments. The Trnava factory has been chosen to produce this specific product because it has the capability of pulling off the higher-end details. This path through the factory line is one Ikea designers often follow from the earliest stages of their design development. Theyll tour Ikea-owned factories like this or the roughly 800 independent suppliers that produce the furniture, dishware, picture frames, and toilet cleaners that are sold in Ikeas 481 stores in 63 global markets. What a given factory can make often helps shape a products design, and the design can push the factory to adopt new technologies and production methods.A long shelf in the new Stockholm collection, also designed by Wihlborg, used a minimalist framing system that required extra strength in the fittings connecting the horizontal shelves to the uprights. Through a series of consultations, prototypes, and samples sent back and forth from Trnava to Ikeas headquarters in Älmhult, Sweden, the design and factory teams landed on a unique, diagonally milled solution. We very much appreciate these challenges, says Marek Kováčik, site manager at the Trnava factory. We never say no.[Photo: Ikea]The flat-pack formlaIts not only the product that has to be beautiful. The production has to be beautiful, says Johan Ejdemo. As Ikeas global head of design since 2022, hes acutely concerned with the look, quality, and sales of the 1,500 to 2,000 new products that make their way into Ikea stores every year. As a trained cabinetmaker whos spent years inside a carpentry shop, hes also attuned to the realities of actually producing those products, and the compromises that sometimes have to be struck between design intention and material reality.There needs to be this rhythm. Its almost like a dance. It has a certain tempo. It has a certain flow, he says.That dance is sometimes led more by a products design, at other times by the factorys table saw tolerances, and at other times by the economics of cramming a coffee tables parts into one box instead of two. Always, since the earliest days of Ikea as a furniture retailer, the end cost to consumers is the ultimate guide.First of all, we have the mission that we need to be smart with resources because we need to keep costs down. Because keeping costs down will enable a lower price, and the lower price will make more people able to afford it, Ejdemo says. Its taking top-shelf things and moving them down a few steps so theyre easier to reach.This approach to what Ikea calls democratic design has been baked into the companys DNA since it evolved from a provincial mail-order catalog in the 1940s to a home furnishings retailer by the mid-1950s. Its unique perspective on design, production, and packaging is all connected by the fundamental philosophy of self-assembly that has turned Ikea into a global behemoth.Company lore has it that the light-bulb moment came around 1952 when Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad and early Ikea employee Gillis Lundgren were wrapping up a photo shoot for a new Ikea catalog and they needed to move a bulky table. Lundgren noted how much simpler it would be to store the table if the legs could just come off. Kamprad realized that furniture would be so much easier (and cheaper) to sell through his mail-order business if it left the factory disassembled and as flat as possible.[Image: Ikea]In Leading by Design: The Ikea Story, a 1998 book coauthored by Swedish journalist Bertil Torekull, Kamprad writes that this became the basis for how the company approached all its products. Kamprad, who died at age 91 as a self-celebrated penny-pincher, summarized the Ikea way as a design that was not just good, but also from the start adapted to machine production and thus cheap to produce. With a design of that kind, and the innovation of self-assembly, we could save a great deal of money in the factories and on transport, as well as keep down the price to the customer.Over the decades, this thinking has become inextricably connected to every stage of Ikeas product development, which Ejdemo says has been helped along by better design tools, new factory technology, and innovative fittings to improve self assembly. Particleboard can be engineered to have higher density in the places where screws will make connections and lower densities elsewhere to bring down the total weight. An internally developed wedge dowel allows some parts to be snapped together without any screws. The company has even adopted a technique from orthopedic medicine in which snap-together elements are ultrasonically welded into wooden pieces, forming a tight connection that allows parts to be assembled and disassembled repeatedly. Collin, who helped integrate this solution, says the company had been looking at ultrasonic welding for other purposes, but it ended up being a perfect way to integrate the hardware of a furniture piece. The inside of a bone is quite similar to particleboard, he says. Operating at such a large scale in markets all over the world, Ikeas product developers learn to internalize the interconnected nature of designing for the factory, the box, and the end user. Ejdemo, who started at Ikea in 1999 as a product engineer, says designers come to have three numbers in their minds at all times: the 80-centimeter width and 120-centimeter length of the shipping pallets that carry boxed products from factory to store, and the 25-kilogram weight limit (about 55 pounds) the company has for those boxes.Some might call this a curb on creativity, but Ejdemo sees it pragmatically. I need to consider this because it will be considered anyway at some point, he says. If youre not on top of it as a designer you might see things happening that you wouldnt want to happen from a design perspective.[Image: Ikea]Achieving massive scaleWalking through the Trnava factorys vast halls, production manager Michal Puškel bends down periodically to pick up a stray piece of packing tape or paper from the floor. The factory is impeccably clean, despite stacks of particleboard snailing their way across acres worth of conveyors, and high-speed saws, mills, and drills cutting through boards by the thousands. The factory has been operating here since 1990, back when this was still Czechoslovakia and Ikea was making inroads into formerly communist countries.Over the years, the Trnava factory has been thoroughly modernized, with long chains of automated machines and a growing number of robotic arms deployed throughout. Puškel seems to know each machine just as well as the many workers he stops to chat with on his way down the production line, highlighting their unique capabilities and stepping over components to point out the best view.[Photo: Ikea]At the end of one machines conveyor, he leans over a rail and pulls off a processed board, one of the bigger parts of the credenza the factory is currently producing by the hundreds per day. With his finger he touches the places where, within seconds, the machine has milled small notches where other pieces will soon be attached, and its also drilled the precise holes that customers will use to complete the final assemblythe sweat equity that keeps Ikea prices low.The Trnava factory specializes in this type of particleboard and veneer manufacturing, known as flat-line production, where each piece moves down the line and slowly gets turned into a more refined part of a piece of flat-pack furniture. But some items require more attention to detail, including several of the pieces the factory is making for the new Stockholm line.One is the long shelving unit Wihlborg designed after a lengthy back-and-forth with the factory over how to connect its shelves to its upright supports. The solution they came up witha somewhat complex hole milled at a 45-degree angle into the upright supports in order to conceal the hardware in the finished piece and maintain strengthrequires each shelf and upright to get processed by a massive computer numerical control (CNC) milling machine. Crossing the factory to a bright and noisy corner, Puškel shows off a cluster of CNC machines that can take each of those shelving units pieces and mill the angled hole, perform multiple cuts using a menacing multiblade saw arm, and smooth out the radii to ensure the pieces come together snugly.Nearby, a worker has a recently milled board up on a table with a measuring tape, and hes consulting a diagram as he checks the size of each hole and groove. We inspect every hour, Puškel says, with his own eye on the inspector. Other parts of the factory have a visual system to check for less-intricate mistakes, like chipped corners or misaligned veneers; if it sees a problem five times in a row, it automatically shuts down the line.Mistakes happen, and Puškel says its critical to keep a close watch on the line any time it starts up on a new batch of one of the hundreds of furniture types the factory produces. But it doesnt take long for the factory to find its groove. After a half hour, everything will be stable, Puškel says. Then it will be ready to keep pace with Ikeas massive globe-spanning scale.[Photo: Ikea]The big business of logistics Ikea has a business imperative to pay so much attention to the intricacies of how every piece of furniture is designed, made, and packaged. Craig Martin, a professor of design at the University of Edinburgh, has written extensively about mobility and design, from shipping containers to the cardboard blocks used to fill empty space in Ikea furniture boxes. He says Ikea is uniquely concerned with these mundane details. In the traditional design process, packaging is a bit of an afterthought. With Ikea, packaging design and logistics were very much part of that same developmental process. I think thats one of the most interesting things about Ikea, Martin says. Im not aware of many other manufacturers or companies who are so invested in logistics the way Ikea is.The reasoning behind it is cost, Martin says, which has been key to Ikeas ability to gain such a large share of the furniture market. Its about the economics of it. If you can save money by building logistics and packaging design into the design process, then thats the crux, he says. As a company with tens of thousands of employees worldwide, Ikea has plenty of specialists who make sure packaging is optimized and logistics are efficient. But these concerns have also trickled down throughout the design and product development pipeline, and designers like Wihlborg can conceptualize their design as both a built and a flat-packed product. During the process, of course we think about how to knock down the product and pack it in a flat pack, so we dont go into something that is impossible, Wihlborg says. We always have it in mind.[Image: Ikea]Flat-packing concerns shape decisions far beyond the look or size of individual items. Karin Gustavsson, creative leader for the Stockholm 2025 collection, says the close collaboration between designers and factories helps ensure these efficiencies are identified as early as possible. If you see that it helps to make the table 10 centimeters smaller in length, then we need to start over to do new samples and try it and ask is it okay to just shrink it in length or should we change anything else, she says. All this is in the design process.These considerations end up playing a surprisingly large role in determining the design of Ikeas products. For example, the dining table Wihlborg designed for the Stockholm 2025 collection used one density of wood where its legs attach, a lower-density around the perimeter, and a nearly hollow but structurally sound honeycomb-shaped cardboard filler for the centeran approach that reduced its overall weight while reducing its risk of bending. It also meant the tabletop wouldnt need a supporting frame underneath, cutting material use, the total number of boxes the product fits in, the overall cost to customers, and the carbon emissions required to ship it. Those things we can simulate very easily with computerized design, Gustavsson says.Some have criticized Ikea for optimizing its design for cost, arguing it creates a kind of disposable furniture that sacrifices duraility for rock-bottom prices. The Lack side table, now retailing for $12.99, is one common scapegoat. It is also a perennial bestseller. With thousands of products on offer, Ikeas range of quality is inevitably going to be wide, but Gustavsson says the company is trying to prove that it can hit new heights in quality without getting too far out of the common persons price range. We dont believe in fast fashion always. Weve tried to make Stockholm very high quality and long lasting. It has been the mantra for us to show that Ikea could really be this high-end furniture, Gustavsson says. Well also attract a new customer, we believe.[Photo: Ikea]The company is also trying to counter the disposable-furniture criticism by prioritizing design for both assembly and disassembly, allowing customers to more easily pack up a piece of Ikea furniture and move it to a new place instead of leaving it on the curb. Collin, who was part of the team that developed the snap-in-place wedge dowel, says the move is toward enjoyable assembly, and new fittings and assembly techniques are part of making that possible.He points to studies the company does of peoples expectations of how long it will take them to build a given item. With the old fittingsthink screws and hex wrenchesit always took double what they expected, Collin says. Now, with pieces that snap boards together instead of chip-prone nailings or patience-draining hex screws, more and more products have milled wedge dowels that snap and lock into place and easily placed plastic fittings that hold a bookcase backing tight without a single nail. We always try to be better and better on assemblies. You should feel like you made it in the time you expected, Collin says. If a product is easier to build, he says, it should be easier to take apart as well.This thinking is making its way across Ikeas design portfolio, according to Ejdemo. The whole system change toward circularity will demand a lot of us. How will things be packed and distributed and how will you be able to resell, repair, give a second life, upgrade, update, he says. Theres more involved in this than the products, but it will require shifts and new thinking into the products to enable that to happen.[Image: Ikea]Near the end of the production line inside the Trnava factory, the 16 individual wooden pieces of the credenza are all processed and finished, with their uniform oak veneers and precisely aligned dowel and screw holes. Theyve been wheeled or forklifted over from various parts of the factory to the flat-packing area, which has become one of the busiest and most dynamic parts of the facility.Here Kováčik, the site manager, points out the facilitys newest pieces of equipment: a set of five-axis robotic arms that are currently being programmed to perform the Tetris-like job of fitting every part of an Ikea product into a tightly packed boxand in the right order. Its done in consecutive steps, according to the assembly instructions, Kováčik says.The new robots are doing the heavy lifting, grabbing the largest pieces of the credenza and laying them inside the bottom of a box another machine has just finished folding and gluing. Down the line, two human workers neatly place a few of the smaller wooden pieces in the box before it moves on to another group of workers who lay down other parts of the credenza. Each one goes in a specific place, with the narrow gaps of negative space filled in with strips of thick cardboard, placed down by hand. By the time each worker has laid their pieces in the box, another is coming toward them on the conveyor belt.[Photo: Ikea]Puškel, the production manager, says the robots will eventually be able to plop in even the smaller parts of a furniture item, reducing the need for workers to stand by and place parts in boxes over and over again. He lists out the downsides of such rote human labor: ergonomic risks that can hurt workers, worker sick days that can hurt productivity, and human salaries that hurt the bottom line. Kováčik assures that any work a robot takes over simply creates opportunity for human workers to do something more worthwhile.One job no robot will soon take over is the designated assembly inspector, who spends their shift picking out 10 to 12 finished furniture pieces from the assembly line, opening their boxes, and putting them together, like an Ikea customer outfitting a new apartment. On this day, the inspector on duty takes a little more than 10 minutes to mostly build the credenza, looking for the main issues of chipped corners and mismatched veneer colors. Once its passed, the inspector takes the pieces apart and places them neatly back in their boxes to join the rest of the days output. Stacks of these boxes make their way to another set of robots that carefully arrange them on pallets that will be shipped around the world and placed in the warehouse-like self-serve sections of Ikea stores. One last refrigerator-size machine reaches out a robot arm and slaps the palletized boxes with identifying labels. Now, Puškel says, with a nod, its finished. [Photo: Ikea]A long-term relationshipBack in the factorys second-floor conference room, Collin is sitting on the credenza he and Wihlborg have just assembled. Im not the heaviest TV, he says. His point is that this is a piece of furniture thats meant to perform, withstanding all the reasonable and sometimes unreasonable conditions it will be thrust into when it ends up in a living room in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Guangzhou, China.[Photo: Ikea]For all the ways Ikea furniture is designed for the back endfor the companys design intentions, for the supply chain and production process, for the complex logistics of global dominationit is, ultimately, something that will live in peoples houses for years or decades. The way the furniture is designed, produced, and shipped is interconnected in an increasingly complex way. But the goal remains quite simple: to create furniture that people will use.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||