It is the end of the semester and my student teams have just made their final presentations on their Lean Assessments and recommendations for improvement. The lean assessments are their team projects for the Lean Principles and Practices in Organizations course that I teach at Oakland University. During the past five years, the student teams have conducted more than 30 Lean Assessments of companies that are in various stages of their lean journeys.
One of the consistent findings that the student teams make is that the lean way of thinking and working together has not captured the “hearts and minds” of the most important people in the process — the frontline employees. They find there is limited buy-in of the lean philosophy.
As I indicated in an earlier Target Online article, lean is a system that creates a physical and social environment where problems are quickly identified and then solved by motivated employees who are trained to eliminate waste in their processes so that customers receive the highest quality products and/or services at the lowest cost in the shortest lead time.
In other words, the job of frontline employees is to do the work and improve the work. In the best lean companies, employees believe it is their job to do their assigned work and identify and solve problems that they encounter. Not just sometimes, or when their supervisor tells them to, but all the time because it is their job and they want to do it. Most companies have not achieved this Holy Grail of Lean yet — and it is the key to a successful lean transformation.
Capturing the “heart and minds” of frontline employees is the essence of the lean system, as the House of Lean diagram illustrates below:
How do the best lean companies get there? From what my students and I have seen, there are three primary ways. I call them the 3 Ls of Lean — Leadership, Learning and Listening.
Leadership — The leaders of the best lean companies practice the exact behaviors they want the frontline employees to exhibit, not just at the beginning of their lean journey (but that is a good start), and not once in a while, but over and over again as a normal part of how they “lead” and run the business. The best lean leaders “do” more than they “say.”
As one student reported in his team’s presentation, the frontline employees told him, “If the boss doesn’t do it, why should we?” What the frontline employees are saying is why should we change our behavior, why should we look for “extra work” and why should we commit to something that may be gone tomorrow? If they don’t see the leader practicing lean behaviors, they don’t trust what he or she says and ultimately they won’t do it when no one is looking.
What are the lean behaviors that lean leaders need to practice all the time? It starts with kaizen. The most advanced lean companies use kaizen to develop their employees, not just to fix problems. Lean leaders need to be active members of a kaizen team that is working on business problems.
Working on a kaizen team forces them to get out of their normal roles and go to the gemba. It requires them to see what is really happening on the shop floor or in the administrative offices. And, it is a highly visible example of the leaders “walking the lean talk.” Frontline employees see this and start to believe that there may be something to “this lean thing” because the bosses are doing it!
Learning — The best lean companies train all their employees on lean, especially their frontline employees. They train them so that employees learn that lean is applicable to them and means something to the work they do. The companies then almost immediately assign them to a kaizen project in the area in which they work. They learn and do.
It is Just-In-Time (JIT) learning that shows the frontline employees the value of lean for them and the company, but most importantly for them. It very directly answers the WIIFM question (What’s In It For Me?). It engages them in real problem solving with results they can see. They can feel the value of lean and see the relevance to them and the work they do.
It trains them on lean tools and techniques they need to solve the problems at hand. It gives them confidence because they learn how to use these tools to solve problems that have been a “pain in the neck” for some time. There is something heroic about “slaying the dragon” and a lot of their co-workers see and appreciate what they have done. The “learn-do” cycle creates a buzz in the work group.
Now frontline employees are motivated to solve problems and they have some idea how to do it. The lean system starts to grab their “hearts and minds” because they feel good about themselves and, oh yes, it makes sense to them in today’s hyper-tough global economy.
Listening — The best lean companies have a highly visible, quick turnaround suggestion program. Why? Because the leaders of these companies understand that the employees doing the work — the frontline employees—are the best IEs and quality inspectors in the plant. Frontline employees know more than anybody else about how the work is done and how to improve it.
Even more importantly, these leaders know that the best way to show respect and build trust with their employees is to listen to them — and that lean doesn’t work without trust and mutual respect.
The best lean companies take listening to their employees very seriously! The gold standard is Toyota where more than 2 million suggestions are submitted worldwide every year and 95 percent are adopted.
These suggestion programs are not your grandfather’s wooden suggestion box on the wall. They are an in-your-face, highly visible, quick response vehicle for employees’ ideas for continuous improvement.
The suggestion forms are ubiquitous throughout the plant, are easy to fill out and are displayed for everyone to see. All types of suggestions are encouraged. The emphasis is on small, continuous improvement — kaizen— suggestions that affect their immediate work area and can be evaluated and approved fast by their supervisor. Recognition and some rewards drive the program, but mostly it’s the power of listening that propels the process.
Leadership, Learning and Listening — the best lean companies know the 3 Ls are the pathway to capture the “hearts and minds” of their frontline employees and they work hard on them every day.
Happy Holidays!
Mark S. Doman is a Pawley Professor in Lean Studies at Oakland University in the Human Resource Development Department and the Director of the Pawley Lean Institute. Prior to joining Oakland University, he had 25 years of business experience with Ford and AT&T, where he held various executive positions in operations, human resources and legal. He has led several major organizational change initiatives throughout his career that included corporate restructuring, Lean Workouts, kaizens, TQM and process re-engineering. He is the author of “A New Lean Paradigm in Higher Education: A Case Study.” Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 19 No. 3, 2011 and “How Lean Ready Are You?” Target, Vol. 28 No. 2, 2012. His email address is doman@oakland.edu.
