Lean Tip
#3316 – Practice Positive Thinking
Having a
positive outlook on workplace changes can greatly influence your ability to
accept and adapt to them. To take on a positive outlook, consider the purpose
of changes within your workplace and how they can positively influence your job
role and work environment. By looking for potential benefits to changes within
the workplace, you make it easier to accommodate them.
Lean Tip
#3317 – Ask Questions Frequently
As you
incorporate changes into your daily work routine, you need to ask as many
questions as possible to those in charge of overseeing new procedures or
activities. Asking even the simplest of questions can help you gain a better
understanding of how to complete new tasks and help you learn more about why
these changes are necessary.
Lean Tip
#3318 – Help Your Coworkers Adapt to Changes
Once you
start to understand new practices or routines, it's important that you assist
your coworkers with adapting to the changes. This demonstrates teamwork,
encourages positive relationships and ensures you can go to them for help when
you need it as well.
Lean Tip
#3319 – Celebrate the Old
All too
often, old policies, programs, strategies, and work are dismissed out of hand
as a new direction unfolds. For employees who worked hard on those items, this
can be a major slap in the face, erode morale, and lead to more concern. During
a period of change, leaders should recognize that such work happened, was
important, and had meaning. Underappreciated employees will have a harder time
embracing new initiatives.
Lean Tip
#3320 – Find Key Influencers
Every
organization has key players who have earned the respect of their coworkers,
have longevity (and therefore perspective), and are influential. Getting key
players on board and letting them act as a sounding board can help senior
leaders better understand how change is being perceived, refer recurring
issues, and become advocates for the change. Walking these influence-leaders
through the change process and getting them on board can help with
communication and confidence during the change period.
Lean Tip
#3321 – Listen Carefully
Employees
are going to have a lot of questions, ideas, feelings, and emotions. It is
important for managers, from front-line supervisors to c-suite leaders, to
openly and actively listen to these concerns, validate them, and address them
as clearly and frankly as possible. Even if you are unable to address their
concerns, it is important to express that the employee concerns have been heard
and will be addressed at a later date.
Lean Tip
#3322 – Articulate Challenges
All
changes come with risk of the unknown, uncertainty, and other potential
challenges. It is important that companies are upfront about the challenges
that may be faced. Even if those challenges have not been fully identified and
planned for, it is a good move to try and discuss the potential challenges, the
range of those challenges, and what the company is doing or will do to address
them.
Lean Tip
#3323 – Defining the Change
Change is
often not fully articulated at the beginning of a change management process.
Due to the iterative nature of change, it may be necessary to not just define
the change at the outset, but redefine the change at various steps along the
way. Updates should be provided frequently to mitigate rumors, answer
questions, and provide reassurance. The faster change is happening, or if it
begins to accelerate, the more frequent updates should be.
Lean Tip
#3324 – Make change Compelling and Exciting
Employees
can better understand the rationale behind a change when organizations
prioritize purposeful, clear and consistent communication. This targeted
communication strategy provides the context to understand the why, what and so
what of the change. Effective communication answers the most important question
people are thinking: What does this mean to me; how will it impact my work?
With a deeper, clearer understanding of the change, employees are much more
likely to ask, “How can I help?”
The shift
from rote compliance to true engagement and belief is powerful. Strong employee
support deters change resistance that could hold the organization back.
Lean Tip
#3325 – Don’t Ignore Resistance
Change
resistance is poisonous to an organization’s transformation. Resistance is much
easier to counter when it’s identified early. Leaders should pay attention to
the signs of change resistance, including inaction, procrastination,
withholding information and the spread of rumors. Communication is the key to
identifying resistance. Create feedback loops with employees, like surveys,
feedback channels and input sessions to proactively identify signs of
resistance, then take fast action.
Lean Tip
#3326 – Daily Management Board Belongs to The Team
As a
manager, you may have a burning desire to create our own vision of an
information center or visual management board in the middle of your factory or
workplace. It is important to resist the temptation. However, the goal of
visual management boards is for front line teams to understand operational
performance and engage in improvement.
Therefore
your role as a manager is to coach your teams to understand their performance
and measure it themselves. This starts with a conversation about “what does a
good day look like”? Ask the team how they measure performance. They may have
simple indicators such as numbers of jobs completed or boxes packed, which make
sense to them.
A simple
throughput measure like this is usually the start. You may only initially track
one metric and then expand this to include metrics in safety and quality. Keep
the number of metrics low – ideally three or four, but no more than six or
eight.
The board
also should not only be a collection of graphs but instead should show problem-solving
activities aimed at improving the performance and list current issues that the
team is working on. It is a communication board for the team, not just a place
to record data on performance.
Lean Tip
#3327 – Choose Effectiveness Over Good Looks
One of the
greatest frustrations with implementing visual management boards is managers’
preoccupation with aesthetics – how the board looks. I strongly advocate for
handwritten graphs and problem-solving strips because this shows that it is the
team itself that is updating the data. Using the “green pen = on target, red
pen = off-target” approach really communicates strongly to the team how they
are going. The team leader has to pick up the red pen to record off-target
performance.
This is a
very conscious act and makes the Team Leader and the team very aware of the
problem performance area. It then inevitably prompts a problem-solving
discussion about how to turn the red line into a green one.
Lean Tip
#3328 – Make Engagement a Priority Instead of Standardization
Another
obsession of some managers is “standardizing” the appearance of the boards.
Again the drive behind this is aesthetics rather than employee engagement. The
boards are located in different work areas and managed by teams who perform different
functions and therefore the boards should look different. They should reflect
on the particular priorities and issues of each team. You can have some common
themes such as requiring each team to record metrics for safety, quality,
performance, and morale.
Lean Tip
#3329 – Boards are for Conversation Not Wallpaper
If you
think just putting information on a Visual Management Board on the wall will
get people to engage, then you will be disappointed. I’ve seen many big
immaculate visual displays sprawling across entrance halls and walkways with
literally dozens of metrics displayed. Here is the bad news: no one looks at
them. In many cases, the job of printing the graphs and posting them is
delegated to an administrative staff member and not even the business leaders
notice or read the graphs.
I call
this type of visual management board “wallpaper” because that is the only
function they serve. The boards need to be the focus of structured daily
conversations about how the team is going, what are the barriers to improvement
and how these barriers can be overcome. Therefore visual management boards go
hand in hand with daily meetings.
Lean Tip
#3330 – Focus on the Critical Few
Be sure
to narrow your focus. Too many measures create clutter and detract from what is
most important. Hopefully, your organization has developed True North metrics
and your team has specific measures to impact these targets. Items you put into
your visual management should be the things you are actively working on and
talking about. If this isn’t the case, then you don’t have visual management,
you just have wallpaper.
