5. How to get engaged employees committed to continuous improvement?

Engaged and committed employees is something that all leaders wish and strive for. However, in order to reach Operational Excellence and a culture of continuous improvement it is not enough to aim in that direction. You have to succeed. This is by many described as THE challenge to become Lean.

What happens otherwise is that the organisation initially get some good results, for example lead time, efficiency, cost and sometimes quality improvements. But the changes do not stick and the organisation never becomes flexible and able to adapt to changes. After some time things go back to the way it was before, the effects erodes and improvements stops. When this happens it can be very hard to "re-launch" a Lean initiative since employees associate it with something negative.

So, what can be done to avoid this pitfall? The question we asked was:
What are critical success factors to get engaged and committed employees who takes responsability and continuously strive to improve?


We were also curious to understand if there is a difference how to get engagement from top management and from associates and therefor asked the question twice for these groups.

1. For all employees, managers and associates, it is critical to get a success story to communicate internally. For top management a success story might be achieving tough goals regarding improvements in operational efficiency leading to cost savings or improved customer service for example. For the associates the same success story might be that the operational improvements were achieved while reducing over time, stress and firefighting activities.
2. Another critical activity is to train employees on all levels to increase the understanding of Lean. This training can be done internally or externally and should be customized to the organisation and the groups of employees depending on their needs.
   - Lean coordinators (Navigators) require the most advanced training since they will coach line managers and often become the future leaders.
   - Managers and key resources who are about to get started require some technical skills coupled with leadership training to understand how their leadership need to change.
   - All employees need some basic introduction to Lean to understand how the values, principles, ways of working and expected results are related.
3. Both managers and other employees need inspiration. For management this can be external speakers, consultants or peers from other companies. The managers in turn, need to inspire their associates and be able to explain why the new way of working is important.
4. It is absolutely essential for managers to communicate effectively and to make their teams and associates feel informed about and included in the Lean journey.
5. The employees have to feel empowered and responsible for their own work and continuous improvement. In order to achieve this managers have to ask questions instead of telling the employees what to do. 
6. The managers need to be present on the floor and go and see for themselves. They need to transform from managers who read reports and administer to leaders who coach and see all their associates and help them to grow.

To summarize this challenge; it is critical for management to get on board early, to learn  about Lean and assume responsibility and always practice what they preach. Or as John C.Maxwell said: "A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way". The associates need to find motivation, assume responsibility for their own actions, always do their best and make continuous improvements part of the daily job. 

4. Which roles are required to successfully implement Lean?

Many respondents mention the importance of having top management driving, or at least sponsoring, the Lean effort. However, a vast majority (over 80%) thinks that dedicated Lean resources are critical in order to get started and to quickly build knowledge and understanding of Lean and to get success stories. There are different names for what these roles are called, but in general two types of roles are mentioned many times:

• A central team sponsored by the CEO / DG or someone else in the executive management team. This central team should be a center of excellence with responsibility for methodology and best practice, training and communication plans among other things.
• Local Lean resources / improvement managers / change agents (full or part time) with competence about Lean and continuous improvement work who support and coach the line managers during implementation.

Some argue that the implementation can be driven by line people from the start, but at the same time say that it is hard to get enough focus and traction without dedicated resources.

"In a way it would be best if you did not have to assign dedicated resources and that the new way of working and acting is the responsibility of managers in the line organisation. But often Lean coaches are required to get things done and to constantly get focus on Lean. The risk with dedicated resources though, is that too much responsibility for the implementation is handed over to these resources."

A second part of this question was how these roles change with time as the organisation matures and the culture of continuous improvement sticks in the organisation. Here the answers differ more. Many think that it depends on the size of the organisation. Small companies can integrate Lean completely in the line organisation while large organisations need more central coordination and methodology development in a central function.

"It depends on the organisation, the culture and way of working how to proceed. You need to analyse that first. Our experience is that in the beginning we had dedicated resources working with a Lean project. With time Lean becomes "the way of working" in the organisation and we now have dedicated Lean leaders supporting the way of working and an organisation called Operational Excellence with different competences in methodology development, processes, training etc."

3. How to get a successful start on the Lean journey?

This question was devided into two sub-questions: What are the main challenges to get started? And what are the key successfactors to overcome these challenges?

According to the expert respondents the challenges are:

While employee resistance and lack of commitment can be seen as the same thing it does not change the fact that Poor understanding of Lean is by far the biggest concern when getting started. The proposed success factors to address these issues where, in order of appearance:

1. Get executive management and key middle managers on board first
2. Train the organisation and develop an understanding of what Lean is and how it can improve your business
3. Start with a pilot to get a success story
4. Think long term, let it take some time

There were also some suggestions on how to get top and middle management on board, if they aren't from start. The most frequent suggestion is to train top management and to get help from outside by independent advisors, consultants or top managers from other companies that are already successfully implementing Lean.

Follow and contribute to the discussion on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Where-how-start-Lean-implementation-1816278.S.51030951?qid=0433442e-25cc-4227-b188-1cae9e6d5f9c&goback=%2Egmp_1816278
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/How-do-you-start-implement-123111.S.51958259?qid=5e3da490-65d2-4c84-8ac6-22c747599b3b&goback=%2Egmp_123111