Practical Engagement
Sought After Yet Not Simple
In today's workforce, fostering a significant shift in your culture is a sought-after aim, yet not a simple proposition. With that said, aligning your performance environment is a practical approach that will supercharge your problem solving capabilities, align key leaders, pull in performers that do the work, and will get you WAY more bang for your buck.
Engagement is the employees’ view that their work matters and there is an ongoing way to participate in what matters. In plants that do hands-on work, employees who consistently contribute to solving problems—and see how those improvements impact the organization’s goals—are engaged. Employee engagement is vital to sustain organizational strength, most especially in a shifting marketplace.
In many companies, the engagement domain is typically outsourced to the HR function. It makes sense that Human Resources are the organization’s people experts. With that said, it takes a process and the right kind of dialogue to get line-workers, leads, supervisors, technical experts and managers to understand the root issues in the same way. There’s an opportunity to use these processes to build routines for engagement — and aligns the right leaders. Many times there is a pressing problem on a line that presents an opportunity to get a workgroup moving in the same direction. We hear complaints like,
“This line is a bottleneck to plant throughput, and we can’t get anybody to work here.”
“We are growing and there is too much downtime on this line.”
“We have a big turnover issue.”
Classroom training time for the Operations department is typically limited. Coaching on the line may or may not happen. And even when there is desire to coach on the line, supervisors may or may not have coaching, leadership skills, or alignment to make it happen.
Most jobs are more complicated these days. There is automation, robots, tighter food safety, quality, and regulatory requirements, old equipment in some cases, not to mention fast changing customer requirements. Line workers—the ones who get a quick pass training for onboarding, at best, have dozens of inputs, variables and outputs to monitor and control. If they do get on-the-job training, its typically what we call Sitting by Arnold or Deep End training. Not so effective…
Core operations suffers.
People issues arise.
Support staff gets in the weeds.
Root issues get buried.
Stress is high and alignment is off track.
Humans are hard to find—to work in the plant.
You' know the story. We are in rapidly changing times. It is time to change the story.
Are you still firefighting?
Thomas Gilbert, the father of performance engineering taught us that the effect of the performance environment will always dominate individual efforts, therefore organizing the performance environment from the point of view of how the work is accomplished is a major lever for what I call “practical engagement.”
Training is not the entire answer, although important. Looking at standard work provides a peek into the performance environment. Shared understanding at the heart of ops, ultimately ties directly to the epicenter of business value: the product delivered to the customer. Of course behind the scenes are all the core processes that make on time delivery and quality happen. Core processes are at the heart of all value that matters to the customer. There’s a lot that can go astray when we are talking aligned processes. Think of an orchestra of dozens of instruments. They all need to be in tune (communications and respect for people), playing coordinated notes (doing the right work, the right way), and hitting the right vibrator or levels (pacing and supply chain flow). This kind or orchestration means everyone needs the skills just like trained musicians, those skills coordinate and they are distinct. When have you seen a professional musicians that doesn’t need to practice and get feedback?
Ongoing skill up of your people at this level, is at the heart of what delivers value.
Fire-fighting is a long way from a well tuned orchestra. Fire-fighting mode comes from a habit of ongoing activity attempting to solve problems quickly, yet misses the opportunity to think through counter measures, experiment, and learn. The whole system needs a new habit.
New habits do not form in a day, and it takes some “jiggering” to find the right habits that lead to flow or high performance. Moreover, in order to solve complex and interrelated problems, you must include all the angles and involve the right people. Since problems happen every day, its important to have a standard and reliable routine to solve the problems, and not relay on ad hoc relationships and go-to people who you know will “get er’ done.” You may have to rely on folks that are still learning, or that you don’t feel 100% comfortable with for one reason or another. Workforce motivation requires a visible process.
Do you have the right kind of participation from the front-line?
The first thing we look for when assessing performance needs is the perception of the folks doing the work. Why?
The view of work as seen from the frontline and the people who do the work is vital when solving layered issues. Think about the front-line as workers, leads, and supervisors. Then, there are the roles that manage this work. Do all these roles look at what’s happening with the hands-on work the same way? How do you know? Do you know what good looks like coming off the line? Are all those roles agreed on what good looks like? Often, this kind of cohesion is not the case.
Practical engagement, begins with agreement at the frontline. And, agreements don’t happen just because someone documents something, not to mention much documentation is written in a language and formats that may or may not be useful for a performer at the line. Rather, agreement comes from discussion, feedback and participation.
If agreement comes from discussion, where is active participation from the frontline happening in your organization?
Structure, Complexity and Flow
When technicians and operators don’t have a known route for their ideas, they often go into a Black Hole (click for a fun science read) and the organization wastes problem-solving potential. Not on purpose. There is so much to do in a plant and much activity happening all at once and constantly. It’s a grand orchestration of activity, handoffs, and flow. And, when you are a conductor, (i.e. manager over operations) you appreciate the construction of a wonderful instrument (think tool), like a conductor appreciates a Stradivarius.
Lean Daily Management (LDM), a set of protocols, mindsets, skills, and structure is like the Stradivarius; it’s a contained instrument, (different from a set of tools) that helps ops management conduct improvement and issues from the floor through the support staff. LDM sets up a meeting structure and protocols to get ideas from the floor moving in the right kind of ways that are visible—to everyone. Like the difference between a Stradivarius and a violin, the difference between LDM and many existing meeting structures is nuanced.
At the same time, the outcomes of LDM are seeing your ideas get taken up or the right people gathering more data to be able to test into countermeasures. This active discussion, feedback, and learning is what I call “practical engagement.” Its a visible way to help humans that are in the trenches for long stretches, contribute and thus feel like their work matters.
In today’s complex and ever-changing work environments, a multi-modal approach to training and development, with a bottom-up and top-down implementation are needed to meet workforce and leadership where they are. The best midsized businesses can professionalize their human factors in a number of specific of ways. It takes a spot of time, and we’ve seen organizations go from Red to Black, working this way.
A few levers we have found to support performance and help plants get organized include activities like:
Clarifying standard work.
Professionalizing the training system so it’s reliable training and not “Sitting by Arnold,” or Deep End training that so many have done for years with moderate success.
Getting down metrics that matter at the line level.
Organizing improvement processes so that right line workers and staff are working on the right problems.
Helping leaders and groups get aligned around goals so they can see what’s in the way of those goals.
Helping groups sort through conflict and get clear about actions and next steps.
What Trouble with Engagement Looks Like
Lack of engagement shows up in all kinds of ways. Let’s take a disorganized RedZone implementation, for example, to illustrate how you can not bypass the people processes and expect technology alone to fix a standard work, or other core issues. In this particular case, the lack of standard work was directly impacting plant production capacity.
A RedZone software was implemented on the line so that operators had a new tablet and processes to set up and monitor the line. The Maintenance group was frustrated because operators were not routinely checking equipment during setups and the machine kept failing. To fix this problem, Maintenance imposed a required checklist to prompt machine operators to check equipment at shift start. This fix was also programmed into the software. To complete the checklist as required, operators had to interrupt any run that was already in progress to start their shift. If the machine was down too long it lost heat. If the machine lost too much heat, the operator had to wait precious minutes for the machine to come back up to temperature before restarting the run. Did we fix the problem?
In this example, the intended solution to prevent downtime actually caused another type of downtime. Had operators had standard work for the set up duty and been properly trained on how the machine works, the countermeasure would have taken all scenarios into account. It’s this type of imposition and grope for control in a stressed system, without a way to pull up and look at the bigger picture that keeps plants in fire fighting cycles.
Often, it’s at the line level where the processes must be put back into place and common understanding re-established. Sometimes trust or empathy need to be re-established. Sometimes that broken respect for people has penetrated to support staff and into the corporate structure, if there is one. Tech solutions alone, won’t solve cooperation friction, obscured work, non-integrated processes, or non-alignment.
Practical Engagement Gets Stuff Done—And Changes Culture
When the environment is organized around how work gets done and there is a consistent route for solving problems—with the perspectives of those that do the work—it will naturally bring out the best in people and encourage their best performance. With a structure, such as Lean Daily Management, experts get to contribute what they know and managers get to be seen as helpful supporters of the people doing work. The problem-solving protocols uphold positivity, and supports productive interpersonal dynamics. Line workers have the opportunity to learn and grow and become more valuable to the organization. Supervisors get to support workers where they are and discover they can expand their capacity to lead. Problems get solved at their root.
It takes company commitment to invest at all levels and set up routines for ongoing participation. It also takes tight leadership alignment. This investment pays off with a type of operational excellence, interpersonal coherence, and management alignment that truly supports the orchestration of work and engages your entire plant.
