The disconnect between managers and regular employees

Shortly after graduating high school, I began working at the service center for a Lexus dealership in Bellevue. This was back in the day when Lexus of Bellevue consisted of two entirely different campuses, a sales center and a service center. Customers brought their cars to the service center for regular maintenance, having problems/issues diagnosed, etc. I worked there as a porter assisting customers and driving customer cars to wherever they needed to go. Sounds fun, right? It does, until you realized your job entailed rapidly moving vehicles worth $50-100k in and out of extremely tight parking spaces. See, the service center got a lot of customers (it's Bellevue, so surprise surprise, there's a lot of Lexuses), so we had to move quickly because on busy days there was always something else you needed to get done: another customer to assist, a car that needed to be moved to the shop, a car that needed to be brought up for a waiting customer. It was very clear that the lot we had was much too small for the number of customers we had, but there wasn't much choice but to wait things out. A new Lexus dealership was being constructed which would unite both the sales and service centers under one roof; until then, we had to make do with what we had.

The odd thing was, our parking spaces were really small. As you can imagine, this is not what you want when parking and moving expensive luxury vehicles. I wondered at our diminuitive parking spaces and heard the following (it's heresay, but I can believe it): the parking spaces had previously been wider, but in an effort to add a few more parking spots management had decided to make the existing ones smaller. If this was true, it seemed to exemplify the classic disconnect between managers and regular employees: management, with little to no idea how things are viewed from the regular employee's perspective, institutes new policies or changes that conflict with the ability of employees to do their job correctly instead of helping or enhancing this ability. Accidents occurred, which meant customer cars got scratched and banged up. Not fun. Had a manager tried working the floor a few days, they would have likely seen that shrinking the existing parking spaces was a terrible idea.

Unfortunately, it seems like this classic situation is all-to-common in American workplaces. The reading included comparisons of the abysmally low number of suggestions made by American workers in comparison to Japanese employees at certain companies. If workers don't have the opportunity to make their voices heard and/or don't feel their opinions are valued by management, this disconnect will continue. Management will issue more decrees that "this is how things shall now be done" and regular employees, who know how things actually get done on the floor, will quietly snicker amongst themselves and continue to go about their work in the way they did things before.