The root cause of the problem is why the employees are worried about the counts.You need to identify this and determine if there is anyway to change it. If it has to do with how people are paid, it is going to be very difficult to change. I would suggest you chart changeovers and delays to producing parts by shift. If there is an imbalance and pay is related to quantity produced, the negatively impacted shift is going to have the perception they are being treated upfairly and you need to work with management to address the difference (set up pay, or deduct set up/downtime from the available hours to produce parts and pay on the available hours).

If all 3 shifts have reasonably similar downtime, you need to interview the operators and get their perception. Perception is reality. If a shift has an incorrect perception you need to talk to the operators and post the information so they accept and adjust their perception, multiple interviews will be necessary to make sure the perception has changed.

Once you are reasonably confident the operators believe all 3 shifts are being fairly treated, you then do a small group training pointing out the negative impact of hiding parts on the customer, on the company, and on the employee.

I hope this helps. Let me know if it worked.

I work in a plant which has three shifts working on a one operator/machine operation. We have a culture where operators are attemping to hide parts and fudge numbers to make their numbers look good.

This creates problems because we are not all working for the same goal for delivering parts to the customer and they are not working as a team.

Can you suggest how we get them to work in a team and still get an idea how each person is doing on their shift?

It seems to me that you shouldn’t be defining your companies culture, but letting your culture define your company.

My 2 cents anyway