Updates
The Lean Enterprise is Taking On Water...
Lean seems to be the talk of the town these days...everywhere except among your employees that have to do it and live with it. You see, there is a huge hole in Lean and the opportunities are pouring out. The majority of your employees don't care about Lean. In fact, a significant percentage resists change. Why? Simply put, they do not see their self-interest being served by lean initiatives. As a matter of fact, much of what they "see" appears contrary to their self interest.
Surveys of US employees (hourly and salary) by Gallup are startling. Seventy-five percent say they could be "significantly more effective," fifty percent said they did "enough to get by," only thirty-seven percent are "working to their full potential," and nineteen percent are "actively disengaged." Gallup defines actively disengaged as fundamentally disconnected from their work. One in five couldn't care less about Lean.
I recently had a conversation with a group of hourly employees from a major utility company regarding the sixsigma/blackbelt program their employer had implemented. They were not impressed. They said they got $14/hour before sixsigma and $14/hour after sixsigma. Their biggest concern was whether they would get their overtime that weekend. About 1:00pm that afternoon as I observed them working very slow and meticulously, I asked them if they were looking for quality problems. They said no..... they were looking for 4 o'clock! Lean is a fundamental disconnect for the majority of employees. A self-interest disconnect.
Among themselves, employees ask questions regarding lean like...if we do this better, faster, cheaper, am I working myself out of a job? Who benefits from this.... the owners of the company? Isn't this just the flavor of the month? How will my overtime be affected? What's in this for me? Contrary to senior management's enthusiasm for Lean, many employees actively resist it.
Many Lean initiatives fail, or fail to reach their potential because they rest on a one-legged stool. They are viewed as an operating strategy, without taking into consideration the organizational psychological aspects and impacts. Who can argue with the mechanics of Lean, SixSigma, etc? The only problem is your employees (hourly and salaried) are looking through a different set of glasses than you are.
The fundamental disconnect is the majority of employees work in a "foreign culture" and exchange time for money, regardless of organizational performance. Now some of you are saying that your corporation has a 401k/profit sharing/ year-end bonuses etc. You might even have other forms of variable pay, but the key issue is...behavioral change. Are your employees working differently today because of it? Are they personally more productive, engaged, seeking and embracing change, and really part of the effort to drive the enterprise forward? Or are they just going along for the ride?
Let me paint a silly picture for you. Imagine for a moment that your company was in the commercial printing business and you had a contract with the government to print $20 bills. And in this printing environment you were implementing and utilizing all the Lean tools, trying to drive improvements throughout the process. The Gallup data would suggest that many of your employees would be working at less then their potential and not particularly interested in your initiatives. Now, if we change one small human variable...if we went to all employees, salaried and hourly and told them of our new compensation system. If we told them that at the end of each month, we would add up the money we printed and share 20% of it with all employees...I wonder what the process would look like then. Throughput, quality, utilization's, scrap, rework - all the metrics would go through the roof.
You couldn't do Improvement fast enough. As a matter of fact, if you stood still you would be trampled in the rush to Improvement. What's the difference...same tools, same acronyms...different results. In short, their self-interest was clearly served.
Now we are not in the business of printing money, or are we? Your financial statement probably doesn't even mention what you manufacture, it just tells us how many dollars you produced last month and at what cost. What we need is a method and means to "dollarize" Lean and share the improvement with all employees. And do that in a manner that has proven to favorably influence the way people work...real behavioral change. Insuring an equitable sharing of the gains between the employee and the organization. It's not easy, but clearly worth the effort.
Connecting employee self interest to organizational performance...we call it