LEAVE THE MEETING ROOM AND GO TO THE GEMBA NOW!
This is about the power of Lean Visual Performance Management and Gemba coaching sessions. It is about Leadership involvement in the day-to-day business of an organization where it matters. We had to introduce the daily Visual Performance Management at the Gemba to put things on an improving platform. The end results were a 30% improvement in productivity and remarkably high people engagement and ownership within 3 months. Now let us see how it all began…
This client of mine had a culture of daily operations meeting which starts at 9.30am at a meeting room just a couple of doors from the plant managers office. The typical agenda was like this:
- Presentation by operations Director
- Presentation of daily performance by each department manager such as production, engineering, maintenance, QA and other relevant departments
- A heated “machine gun shooting” session by the Plant Manager who is not happy with most of the performance followed by subtle finger pointing by the department managers.
- Occasional banging of table
- Meeting ends with a list of instructions to be carried out. This is usually at around 11.00am and it could go on up to 12.00pm on certain days.
- Post meeting small group assembly at the smoking area or at the coffee area with silence and stress quite visible on most people’s faces.
- NOW THIS WAS CYCLICAL WITH LITTLE OR NO IMPROVEMENT IN PERFORMANCE
LEAN arrived at the right moment at the initiative of global Operations VP. It was formal. The first thing we concurred, “LEAVE THE MEETING ROOM AND GO TO THE GEMBA NOW!” It was a time when the operations, daily performance, quality and grassroot people engagement was really essential for the organization to achieve its ambitious productivity goals.
We put several things in place. Among the key things are:
- Prepared a Visual Performance Board at the shop floor (Gemba) and it was to replace all the presentations by department managers.
- Fixed a time: 10.00am daily for STRICTLY not more than 20 MINUTES. No other meeting was allowed in the plant from 10.00am to 10.30am and attendance by the selected people is compulsory. THE MEETING WAS AT THE GEMBA, STANDING.
- Replaced the managers with Supervisors and some shopfloor leaders (occasionally even senior operators) to run the presentation instead.
- Established LEADER STANDARD WORK. Strict rules of conduct and behaviour for all levels of people….including the plant manager.
- Introduced a COACHING METHODOLOGY and trained the managers, directors, and plant managers on it. This was to replace the “shooting sessions” it was a methodology of learning and motivating for improvement and problem solving. Elsewhere this is also known as the Toyota Coaching Kata
- Established SHORT-INTERVAL CONTROL: Updated the visual performance board with information which was more of INPUT VARIABLE in nature than the usual OUTPUT VARIABLE type performance trends. The board was updated 3 times a shift, during a mini-meeting by the shop floor team without the managers.
For the first week we, as LEAN Consultants helped facilitate this daily session to iron out things. It was a great team who learnt fast and were true to the Leader Standard Work established. They picked it up within a week and continued with little or no support from us. Here is what exactly happened within weeks:
- Machine Uptime improved by 20%
- Daily Production target was met almost 99% of the time.
- A constant set of initiatives taken up by shop floor people to improve quality with each project being successful.
- Tremendous ownership and engagement seen as people started to not only take up improvement projects but contributed to new ideas which worked.
- Absenteeism reduced by 50%
This is a very powerful LEAN approach to performance management and people engagement. Most often it is introduced with little success rate. Failure and lack of sustainable results is due to not preparing well and not building-in the systemic measures. The critical systemic success factors include:
Full and committed involvement by top management in the Daily Gemba Process. The biggest failure attitude is: “I am too high in the level of operations to poke my nose into this Daily Gemba activity. Let the middle managers deal with it”.
- Establishing the right Leader Standard Work for all levels
- Practicing formal coaching to motivate and engage the people
- Making the meeting VISUAL
Measuring and driving INPUT VARIABLE METRICS
As 2023 is progressing this may be one of the serious changes to consider for anyone who wants to get positive changes in behavior towards building a LEAN culture.
Experience Sharing,
J Ramesh Victor
