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Creating Employee Engagement, Part 3

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 03-05-10

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This is part 3 on employee engagement. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

The Development of Systems to Support Engagement

When conducting an assessment, one of the most revealing questions that I seem to ask is “if you have found waste or an opportunity to improve, what do you do with it?” I usually get answers ranging from “I don’t know” to “I wait for the next kaizen event.” Organizations will often want people engaged and even teach them some skills to get them engaged, but fall short of creating a mechanism that actually enables this. Instead, we become dependent on the sheer willpower of the individual to decide to overcome momentum and make a change. This is a big chance to take.

Systems and processes must be build that support engagement. This includes problem solving to new idea engagement. There is certainly no one best mechanism.

When developing systems, consider two important criteria in the design. First, consider the natural flow of work. You want people to be able to leverage whatever systems you design while they are doing the work. If they have to disengage with the work to engage in some other system, it is not going to be very supportive of their needs. Second, consider how you can enable decision making at the point of activity within the systems. This might be decision guides, criteria, standard work, or simple empowerment. Anything that requires permission or interruption in order to complete a task is disempowering and disengages the employees.

Systems can include problem solving or help chain systems, suggestion or idea systems, or even processes such as scoreboards and team huddles. I wrote about help chain systems in a Leading Lean column Forging Your Help Chain, and shared the mistakes of many suggestion systems in another Leading Lean column Make Suggestions Productive. The second column demonstrates a common mistake when designing any such system: don’t build a new disconnected system from the work. It must be embedded in the work. It must be physically where the work is done, available when the work is done, work within the flow of daily work, and leverage the infrastructure that already exists.

What systems do you have that help build engagement? What has worked for you?

Comments

  • Jamie,

    Great points – and it shows the challenge when implementing Lean thinking. For sustained success and true employee engagement, it must become part of the “things” that you do, instead of another “thing” to do. When employees say they are waiting for the next kaizen event, it is still another “thing” that they do.

    Glenn

    Glenn Whitfield March 5, 2010 at 9:28 am
  • Jamie,

    Great points – and it shows the challenge when implementing Lean thinking. For sustained success and true employee engagement, it must become part of the “things” that you do, instead of another “thing” to do. When employees say they are waiting for the next kaizen event, it is still another “thing” that they do.

    Glenn

    Glenn Whitfield March 5, 2010 at 9:28 am
  • Jamie,

    Great points – and it shows the challenge when implementing Lean thinking. For sustained success and true employee engagement, it must become part of the “things” that you do, instead of another “thing” to do. When employees say they are waiting for the next kaizen event, it is still another “thing” that they do.

    Glenn

    Glenn Whitfield March 5, 2010 at 9:28 am
  • Your maint point about building the process improvement changes into the flow of the work is absolutely true. I’ve noticed in our hospital that our best sustained lean improvements have come from physical changes that people have but no choice to work within them. An example of this is the creation of a combined admission/discharge room in our mental health unit. With admissions and discharges consolidated and removed from the nurses station we have improved flow and reduced cycle times tremendously. We have much more difficulty with administrative processes, precisely for the reasons you mentioned in your post, Jamie.

    Mark Welch March 5, 2010 at 10:24 am
  • Your maint point about building the process improvement changes into the flow of the work is absolutely true. I’ve noticed in our hospital that our best sustained lean improvements have come from physical changes that people have but no choice to work within them. An example of this is the creation of a combined admission/discharge room in our mental health unit. With admissions and discharges consolidated and removed from the nurses station we have improved flow and reduced cycle times tremendously. We have much more difficulty with administrative processes, precisely for the reasons you mentioned in your post, Jamie.

    Mark Welch March 5, 2010 at 10:24 am
  • Your maint point about building the process improvement changes into the flow of the work is absolutely true. I’ve noticed in our hospital that our best sustained lean improvements have come from physical changes that people have but no choice to work within them. An example of this is the creation of a combined admission/discharge room in our mental health unit. With admissions and discharges consolidated and removed from the nurses station we have improved flow and reduced cycle times tremendously. We have much more difficulty with administrative processes, precisely for the reasons you mentioned in your post, Jamie.

    Mark Welch March 5, 2010 at 10:24 am
  • Someone needs to take the black markers away from the folks that created that VSM and get them some pencils! 😉

    Ron Pereira March 5, 2010 at 11:07 am
  • Someone needs to take the black markers away from the folks that created that VSM and get them some pencils! 😉

    Ron Pereira March 5, 2010 at 11:07 am
  • Someone needs to take the black markers away from the folks that created that VSM and get them some pencils! 😉

    Ron Pereira March 5, 2010 at 11:07 am