Lean Quote: If You Want Engagement, You Must Engage

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"If you want engagement, you must engage." — Karen Martin, The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence 

People choose to become engaged if they have sufficient opportunity and motivation. Having said that, there are things you can do to help. You can create the conditions so that people to do things because they want to, rather than because they were told to.

Do you get a steady flow of ideas from your team? Are they pro-actively coming up with ideas for doing things better in your area? for your customers? Though this may take time to develop, the way to get this going is two-fold: 1) demonstrate your interest by listening to all ideas and 2) demonstrate your commitment by implementing the best ones. Take steps to turn their ideas into action as often as you can. And empower your team to act. Give them the latitude to do it themselves.

Engagement for the sake of engagement is just that. Happy employees are good, but happy employees that contribute to the business by performing in exceptional ways are better. It’s also critical to remind employees and management that engagement is a two way street – the company will do great things for employees and employees will do great things for the company. Very few companies get this right, but those that do create a virtuous cycle of employee engagement where the company does more for its people and the people do more for the company which in turn causes the company to do even more for its people.

Without your employees, your company simply couldn’t do business. Employees keep the company running and keep your customers happy. You can increase employee engagement by actively acknowledging the wonderful work they do as a team. You can also show employees how they make a difference beyond the company’s core business mission by highlighting the impact of the company’s philanthropy initiatives, corporate volunteer programs, and other charitable giving. Recognizing these causes reminds employees they’re making a difference beyond their place of work.

 

5 Ways to Improve Employee Engagement

Employee engagement doesn’t come from a suggestion box. Employee engagement is a workplace approach resulting in the right conditions for all members of an organization to give of their best each day, committed to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, with an enhanced sense of their own well-being. Engaging employees is the process of enabling them to think, behave, act, react and control their work in more autonomous ways, as to be in control of one’s own destiny.

Engagement may not be a new concept to you, but many organizations experience problems because they don’t know how to ‘live it’. Most corporations, however, fail to recognize and empower their most important assets: employees. Engagement in the workplace is an often-misunderstood concept. Employee engagement is a term that many managers and organizations think they understand, but few actually do, and even fewer really put into practice.

Here are 5 ways that you can improve employee engagement in your organization:

1.     Encourage open communication

You can get insight into what things are important to the employee by using surveys, suggestion boxes and team meetings. Be open-minded and encourage them to express their ideas and perspectives without criticism. This means putting into practice everything you have learned about effective listening. Address their concerns in the best way you can.

2.     Support employees in their work and growth

How many of you have responded to a subordinate’s idea as brilliant or even good. Success begets success. You can support employee growth by providing education and learning opportunities, cross training, coaching, and any other interactions that support employees’ personal development.

3.     Collaborate and share on problem-solving

When employees get the idea that their manager or leader is the one who has to solve all the problems, it takes away from their sense of empowerment, and ultimately is likely to decrease engagement over time. Encourage team members to take responsibility, and work through problems or issues on their own, or collaboratively. It’s not the manager’s job to fix everyone else’s problems.

4.     Share More, Not Less.

Even in a small company, silos emerge. A policy of more sharing will help everyone stay in touch with what others are doing, and create a collective expectation. Keeping everyone pointed in the same direction is hard; sharing more about what’s going on, how you’re doing things, reasoning behind decisions, etc. will help.

5.     Culture of Continuous Learning:

Last but not the least is culture of continuous learning. Companies with higher number of knowledge workers grow at much higher pace as compared to competition and their growth is mostly sustainable. Training programs, workshops, brainstorming sessions, and focus group discussions can help employees improve their knowledge. In addition, this process provides peer-to-peer learning opportunities that result in improved performance.

Employee involvement cultivates an atmosphere of collaboration, increases retention of talented staff, and intensifies dedication and commitment. Employees develop a sense of ownership over proposed changes when they are involved.  Employee engagement can not only make a real difference, it can set the great organizations apart from the merely good ones.

Empowering employees is the ongoing process of providing the tools, training, resources; encouragement and motivation your workers need to perform at the optimum level. If your organization is looking for a way to speed processes and still produce quality materials and services, focus on employee empowerment. When you show an employee you trust them, and give them timely information and the authority to find solutions, they will be able to solve problems and provide solutions more rapidly than someone without that empowerment.

Engagement for the sake of engagement is just that. Happy employees are good, but happy employees that contribute to the business by performing in exceptional ways are better. It’s also critical to remind employees and management that engagement is a two way street – the company will do great things for employees and employees will do great things for the company. Very few companies get this right, but those that do create a virtuous cycle of employee engagement where the company does more for its people and the people do more for the company which in turn causes the company to do even more for its people.

What other advice would you suggest? How do you get engagement in your company?

5 Reasons Why Suggestion Boxes Fail

Many organizations want to harness the ideas for improvement that naturally exist in their employees. Suggestion boxes are a common, but ineffective, way to engage employees in continuous improvement. They’re usually implemented with the best of intentions by managers who genuinely want to hear their employees’ improvement ideas, but the boxes fail to produce the desired engagement. Most of the reasons suggestion boxes, or any idea collection process, do not work effectively come down to a combination of process, culture and communication related issues. If you’ve tried to implement a suggestion box system in your organization before, it likely failed due to one of these reasons:

1. Lack of Follow-up
If employees feel you’re not going to seriously consider or implement their ideas, they are unlikely to participate actively. Not only will your employees be unhappy with the organization’s apparent lack of follow up, but this will likely decrease overall employee morale. Employees aren’t going to exert discretionary effort sharing improvement ideas, if they don’t know what happens to them.

2. No Recognition and Reward
A great way to increase employee engagement in continuous improvement is to recognize people for their involvement. Employee recognition doesn’t need to be anything big or fancy - a pat on the back or a high five is enough to encourage the participating employee and promote the engagement of others. Suggestion boxes make this difficult, though, since there’s no public acknowledgement for submitted or implemented improvements.

3. Too Hard to Submit Ideas
Imagine this scenario. You’re a busy front line worker, running around all day trying to get your work done. You have an idea for a way that would improve your. Do you a) Stop working, write it on a slip of paper, run across the department, and drop it in a box, or b) Implement it in your own work... if you remember... maybe. If you’re like most people, you don’t go out of your way to submit ideas that likely won’t be followed up on anyway. If no one is submitting ideas into your suggestion box, your system is failing.

4. Hard to Share Improvements
The best way to spread continuous improvement in an organization is to broadcast improvements. Announcing the impact and recognizing the person who made the improvement encourages others to get involved, and sharing new best practices expands the reach of each idea. With a suggestion box, leaders have to take the time to notify all of the right people about new improvements. Busy managers don’t often take the time to reach out to individuals like that, so the improvements don’t spread.  

5. Doesn’t Promote Engagement
There are several ways to promote the engagement of employees in continuous improvement, including to recognize and reward those who have participated already, broadcast improvements to share best practices, increasing visibility into improvement work to identify high- and under-performing areas, responding quickly to employee engagement, to name a few. Suggestion boxes certainly don’t help with any of these behaviors - and often, they directly interfere with them. Good luck spreading continuous improvement with a stagnant box on the wall.

Suggestion boxes are a bad way to approach a great concept, and the desire to engage employees in continuous improvement shouldn’t be abandoned because that method failed. Instead, I’d encourage you to look into real employee engagement.

The pitfalls of an ill-conceived employee suggestion program are multiple, legendary and most frequently - avoidable. With organizational commitment, clarity and ongoing communication employee engagement can positively impact your bottom line and your employee motivation and enthusiasm.

Lean Quote: Quality is Not Just a System, It is a Culture.

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Quality is not just a system. It is a culture." — Haim Berman 

Corporate culture, safety culture, quality culture, lean culture, … We talk about culture all the time but what is it?

Culture is the environment in which you work all of the time. Culture is a powerful element that shapes your work enjoyment, your work relationships, and your work processes. But, culture is something that you cannot actually see, except through its physical manifestations in your work place.

Culture is like personality. In a person, the personality is made up of the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, interests, experiences, upbringing, and habits that create a person's behavior.

Culture is made up of the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors shared by a group of people. Culture is the behavior that results when a group arrives at a set of - generally unspoken and unwritten - rules for working together.

In a healthy business culture, what's good for the company and for customers comes together and becomes the driving force behind what everyone does. Culture determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant, right or wrong, workable or unworkable. It encompasses all learned and shared, explicit or tacit, assumptions, beliefs, knowledge, norms, and values, as well as attitudes, behavior, dress, and language.

An organizations culture shown in

(1) the ways the organization conducts its business, treats its employees, customers, and the wider community,

(2) the extent to which freedom is allowed in decision making, developing new ideas, and personal expression,

(3) how power and information flow through its hierarchy, and

(4) how committed employees are towards collective objectives.

Company culture is important because it can make or break your company. Companies with an adaptive culture that is aligned to their business goals routinely outperform their competitors.

It affects the organization's productivity and performance, and provides guidelines on customer care and service, product quality and safety, attendance and punctuality, and concern for the environment. It also extends to production-methods, marketing and advertising practices, and to new product creation. Organizational culture is unique for every organization and one of the hardest things to change.

 

Building a Fit Organization

There have been countless literary volumes written about Lean (I know I have read a lot of them) but alas organizations still fail to be excellent. Too many business leaders see process improvement as a mere project, something separate from the more “pressing” goals of profits and growth. That is where they go wrong. And that’s where Building the Fit Organization comes in.

My friend and Shingo Prize winning author, Dan Markovitz, has done it again with a new practical, hands-on guide to making Lean intrinsic to your company. If you read his previous book (A Factory of One), you will already know that Markovitz is an expert in Lean principles, but here he shows how those fundamental principles work in action.

Building the Fit Organization is a must read for any business leader who wants to achieve sustainable operational excellence. Markovitz presents a very readable book that provides simple and compelling advice on transforming an organization. By comparing a fit organization to athletes, he demystifies why organizations so often fail at process improvement initiatives, and presents useful tips for building operational excellence into the core DNA of a company culture. 

Rather than trying to copy Toyota, and failing leaders must learn from it, “learn how to convert their flabby organizations into ‘fit’ ones. Markovitz distills lean management into six principles, devoting a chapter to each, for getting fit:

1. Making an unshakeable commitment to
2. Increase value provided by
3. Doing the right work (things that deliver value to the customer)
4. In the right way (through standard work)
5. With continuous monitoring of processes (through visual management systems)
6. And structured coaching for everyone (using the scientific method).

Throughout the book Markovitz, makes these principles more understandable with an analogy many can relate to of physical fitness and athletic excellence. He draws parallels between the critical principles for business “fitness” and the principles of physical fitness – because the same concepts that make for a fit person make for a fit company. The result is a refreshing, easy-to-read, 193-page books free of Japanese terms and business jargon,

Markovitz uses a number of case studies to illustrate the principles with real world examples.  These companies show what can be possible (results) when implementing the principles of a fitter organization. 

And at the end of each chapter, he includes a “Monday Morning To-Do List” with practical steps for applying each principle. Appendix 1 provides a simple thought provoking self-assessment on how you and your company currently use or don‘t use the six principles. Appendix 2 offers a list of books to dig deeper into tools corresponding to each principles, now that you understand them better.

Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a five-person organization, you can embark on this fitness program. Implementing these principles will set you on the road to organizational excellence (fitness). What are you waiting for start getting “fit” today.

Lean Quote: Foster Innovation Amongst Our Employees

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imagination, our possibilities become limitless." — Jamie Paolinetti 

Innovation can be a company’s best strategic advance, especially in today’s competitive and crowded marketplace. However, for the innovation to occur, most companies have to be willing to embrace the risk of potential failure. Employees may be afraid to offer insight and new ways of doing things because the company culture doesn't support them. If you really want to empower employees, you'll need to create a company culture that encourages and rewards innovation. You may start by asking individuals to look for ways to improve efficiency, output, safety, etc. in the tasks they perform every day. Actually, this kind of an approach across the company always has to start with the tone at the top – if employees see their manager taking risks and testing new ideas, they are more likely to follow suit.

Foster innovation by challenging assumptions about what can and cannot be done. When employees come to you with an idea or a solution to a problem they believe is for the betterment of the company, it’s a sign that they care. Supporting new ideas and giving an individual the chance to ‘run with it’ is motivating, whether or not it works out in the end.

React to mistakes and failures in a way that shows that you condone risk-taking. Give your support, provide resources, and remove barriers to change. Approach problems as learning opportunities. Think twice when people agree with you; show you value independent thinking and reward people who challenge you.

As ideas cannot be shared without honest and open communication, encourage your employees to say a thing or two about company’s latest projects. Communication always takes time, so adequate time and place for discussion and meetings must be apportioned into the normal schedule.