Wednesday's Words of Quality,
Lesson #8: Role of the Team Member in Quality
Lesson #8 of 13
It is safe to conclude that anyone who attempts to adopt Lean management is not satisfied with the status quo and desires to change work outcomes. Lean success is highly dependent on management’s understanding as Steven Spear put it, that “The real challenge is to expand beyond understanding Lean as a set of tools, and more aggressively pursuing an understanding of the comprehensive approach to managing organizations so they are capable of self-diagnosis, learning, and relentless internally generated improvement and innovation.” But how is this done?
To cut to the chase, Toyota’s success
is the result of leadership and employee involvement.
Worker Empowerment and Engagement
Probably the most significant attribute of the Toyota approach is the establishment of a system culture composed of an empowered and engaged workforce that is expected to drive continuous improvements.
This requires consistently held weekly team meetings (brief) devoted to quality improvement of processes. The approaches are based on Lean principles of deeper
process knowledge of failures and proposed interventions for improvement (changes)
based on metrics, until targets of success are met.
This results in a basic expectation of continuous attention to opportunities for improvement by all staff. This also defines the foundation of work. The need to continually improve is woven into the fabric of the people and not viewed as a time consuming inconvenience, option, potential reward, or incentive, as often is the perception in the usual American workforce.
Your success in adapting Lean to your own work environment can be judged when you can walk away and the employee culture can sustain itself in the implementation of continual process improvements.
This requires a critical philosophical difference in the expected roles of your employees.
If you have organized them into teams, we can now refer to them as team members.
Management Failures
Worker Empowerment
Every worker is a potential team member. If they don't understand that they are part of a team and who their team leader is, then that is a management failure.
If they haven't been instructed in the expectation of zero-defect work, the structure for contributing to change, the opportunity to communicate in effective customer-supplier relationships to solve their own problems, and the principles of waste-free, efficient work, then that is a management failure.
Learning by Doing
Unlike many businesses, in the Toyota culture on-the-job employee training in quality
improvement is built into the system such that the expectation embraced by all is that
of “learning by doing” first, with more formal training second. In this approach, staff are
placed in an everyday difficult circumstance and then allowed to problem solve by
doing.
Lean processes are designed to highlight problems in real time where the work is
performed by getting to the root cause and by the person doing the job at the time the
problem occurs. In short, feedback loops making use of indicators and metrics are
designed into the process to allow working staff to identify defects in real-time.
By comparison, the usual American manufacturing approach to training is that of an
undertaking that must be scheduled, presented by formal instruction, with a minimum
of hands-on instruction. In this latter view, training time is viewed as a detractor of
valuable production time.
The Toyota approach to work has been described by Mike Rother as the 'improvement
kata' (a method or routine of human behavior). Can we replicate it? We can certainly
try. It is a fact (proven in industry) that proper training reduces the time associated with
the learning curve and improves quality.
Applying Work Rule #4, Basis of the Improvement Kata
One of the opportunities that most impressed us as a means of moving toward the ideal
condition is Toyota’s Work Rule #4 as defined by Steven Spear, which states that any
improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organization.
That is to say that changes or pilot “experiments” are suggested and carried out by those actually doing the work. This approach also facilitates employee buy-in (empowerment) to change and increases compliance with the new work standard.
From our own experiences in the Henry Ford Production System, we know that when a
employee contributes to the change, they are more likely to experience ownership.
Change then, is not made by, but facilitated by the teacher who is defined as an internal
expert, knowledgeable and experienced in the area taught. This also promotes employee accountability.
By comparison, the American business culture often employs external consultants to analyze and suggest change. Yet many times these ‘experts’ have only minimal knowledge of actual work processes and outputs and must be informed and taught of details by the employees themselves.
Conversely, in the Toyota approach, empowered workers see their daily work in the context of continually making effective process improvement changes that are designed and tested by the scientific method.
To convert to and foster this latter culture, it is important to acknowledge that your employees are the ‘experts’ and hold the knowledge that can result in continually improving the work toward whatever goals are desired by themselves and defined by their leaders/managers.
Problem Resolution by Team Members
In a Lean management system, continuous problem resolution is dependent on a
worker-driven 'bottom up' approach rather than the conventional management driven
'top down' approach to problem solving. By leveraging the quality improvement
organizational structure defined previously that aligns team members with their team
leader and work stations into small teams, we can foster employee identification of the
nature and scope of defects, and stimulate and guide the discussion of possible
solutions that can be tested. This cooperative approach is predicated on a 'no blame but
all accountable' sense of process ownership.
Through an empowering structure that continually informs the workforce about the
quality of their work product and charges them with improving it, employees more
readily assimilate the mantra- "never pass a defect".
Transforming the culture of work, or more correctly the employees’ incentive to relate
to each other and work differently, must occur to obtain success in a Lean enterprise.
The role of leadership is to establish the shift in work expectations, structures and
realignment of incentives so that employees can relate to and interact with each other
horizontally across the path of workflow and contribute collaboratively toward work
process redesign across historical work silos. This takes collaboration of
supervisors/managers who control adjacent, dependent or connected work silos in
customer-supplier relationships.
To be effective in fostering change from the bottom-up, so to speak, the people-focused
strengths of Toyota's culture must be reproduced- namely:
• Employees in charge of their own jobs
• Employees designing standardized work
• Employees working to continually improve the work, with changes made by teams and effectiveness assessed by the customer focused PDCA cycle
Roles of Team Members
In this new Lean culture of work, the consistently engaged, learning, communicating and
contributing team member is expected to fulfill the following empowered roles so that
effective process improvements can be continually designed and tested by scientific
method (PDCA) in the workplace:
• Understand the work rules, principles and tools of process improvement
• Identify defects, daily, on whiteboards or deviation management forms
• Meet in team quality improvement huddles to regularly to share and brainstorm problems in the workplace
• Join teams charged with addressing interventions
• Assist in design of measurement tools and metrics
• Collect the data
• Assist in root cause analysis
• Communicate to other teams, customers-suppliers
• Communicate to managers/leaders
• Keep track of process improvements
• Continually seek better ways of performing the work
• Present results of successes
• Learn from previously proposed interventions that did not work (the failures)
As you can see from these activities described above, all focused on improving the work,
such that teamwork and participation in the process forms the foundation of Lean process improvement.
Required Core Lean Activities
But there is more. There are 4 core activities required of your employees to engage in teams so that continuous improvement occurs.
We commonly entertain the following questions from managers and employees in Lean training that get to the heart of Dr. Deming’s caution that-
"It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best."
Question from manager: How do I get Lean to be more than a sporadic crisis-driven project but rather a continuous improvement initiative owned by all employees?
Question from employee: What’s my role in Lean and what do you want me to do?
Answer: From our 15 years of Lean experience, we have been able to distill our basic employee training in Lean to address 4 new and expected Lean behaviors. These are core educational modules in Lean Bronze Certification Training that define required employee knowledge and engagement in the Lean continuous improvement process.
The 4 activities are:
5S (Sort-Set in order-Shine-Standardize-Sustain)ustain)
Lean culture requires creating a visual, organized, standardized workplace (workcell) that is organized by employees who do the actual work. 5S is a structured approach to workplace organization that begins the process of standardization and creation of the visual work.
Ironically, we here at Henry Ford Health are the rightful heirs of 5S which originated with the 5C workplace organization of Ford Motor Company - Clear-Configure-Clean-Conform-Custom.
PDCA Problem Solving (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
This is a structured approach to problem solving that requires data to define the current condition, understanding the problem more deeply at the level of root cause by involving the customer or supplier, a best guess as to the process change that would improve toward the target condition, an action plan to test the proposed intervention, and data collection to re-evaluate the condition for improvement. Repeated PDCA cycles of process change improvements are implemented until the target condition is achieved consistently.
The desired output of problem solving is Standard Work is created by consensus of those who actually do the work. This is the basis of standardization. Written and practiced standard work is continually improved based on knowledge of defective work yet received or produced in order to reduce variability and waste to achieve higher levels of quality, consistency, throughput, productivity and cost.
Deviation Management
All employees identify and document all defective work encountered to understand what to improve, document corrective actions taken, and contribute to planned process changes to eliminate the most common or severe deviations from expected work outcomes.
Daily Management
All employees attend Daily Management board huddles to identify, track and resolve the most critical defective work processes by contributing to root cause analysis and proposing interventions within 24 hours of occurrence.
The knowledge and skill sets described above define the basic Lean Bronze Certification for beginners in the Henry Ford Production System. Self-directed learning of these basic Lean competencies is available for Henry Ford Health employees and as modules that managers and supervisors may review with their team members.
References:
1. Spear S and Bowen KH: Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System. Harvard Business Review, Sept-Oct, 97-106, 1999
2. Zarbo RJ, Copeland JR, Varney RC: Deviation Management: Key Management Subsystem Driver of Knowledge-Based Continuous Improvement in the Henry Ford Production System. AJCP 148:354-367, 2017
3. Zarbo RJ, Varney RC, Copeland JR, et al: Daily Management System of The Henry Ford Production System: QTIPS to Focus Continuous Improvements at the Level of the Work. AJCP 144:1-15, 2015
