Keep the Change
Want to make the transition to a lean workplace? Implementing new policies and procedures is only part of the equation. The real work comes with getting your employees to buy in.
BY JENNY SHERMAN
Ask a corporate consultant about a challenging client and he may describe a company leader balking on investing in a software system, or a sales team improperly trained in customer relationship management. Not long ago, Kent Myhrman, a business services consultant and certified lean enterprise trainer with MTI, had to convince a welder that lean manufacturing was a good thing. The welder’s name was Tiny. He had tattoos, and soldered machine parts that resembled large augers. “Welders wear a mask for a living, and you don’t expect a person who wears a mask for a living to have great interpersonal skills,” says Myhrman. “I had to give him extra work [as part of the lean initiative], and I thought he was going to put one of those augers someplace on me where it didn’t belong.”
Nonetheless, Myhrman kept at it, explaining that the extra work to implement lean strategies would give the welder more control over his schedule and, in the end, make his job easier. “Tiny thought it over and said, ‘Yeah, I think it’s going to work,’” says Myhrman. “Once he saw he would gain control, he was willing to do the extra work. It simplified the company’s scheduling of this particular part.”
What makes advising about lean practices especially challenging for consultants is that they not only have to deal with the Tinys of the world, but also the sales teams, the supervisors, and corporate leaders as well. Because lean practices, or the techniques used to identify and eliminate wasteful processes in the business cycle, have to occur company wide, changes need to be adopted and implemented by every employee—from the night cleaning crew to the CEO.
But change is scary. Asking people to make the major changes involved in implementing lean can be downright terrifying. “I liken it to the TV show Fear Factor,” says Lloyd Peterson, director of the University of Wisconsin’s SAMA (Stout Advanced Management Assistance) program, which is partnering with Saint Paul College to deliver Lean-Flow services in Minnesota. “It’s a matter of what they can swallow.”
Whether a company has five employees or 500, there will almost certainly be those who are reluctant or even downright mulish about accepting lean changes. That’s why, in order to make lean a success, changes need to take root in the workplace culture. “With lean, it’s 20 percent tools and tactics, and 80 percent culture,” says David Ahlquist, an MTI business services consultant, and the organization’s lean enterprise team leader. “Changing people’s behavior is the challenge.”
That’s the tough part. The good news is that there are ways to take the fear out of impending lean changes and persuade employees—at any level—to embrace lean with open arms.
CULTURE CLASH
Lean concepts were first developed by Henry Ford, but really came of age at the Toyota Corp., which honed them in its signature Toyota Production System. Today, many non-manufacturing industries use the concepts. By methodically hunting down and eliminating waste in business processes, and incorporating elements of line synchronization and pull systems, which replenish inventories in shorter intervals based on customer demand, lean has proven itself through actual results. Improved product quality, reduced production time, and lowered costs are among the benefits.
Despite the positive buzz, people often stiffen when they hear of pending lean changes. Many people think it’s merely a set of tools with trendy Japanese names such as “kaizen” (continuous improvements to eliminate waste), “kanban” (a system that regulates how products are made or moved), and“andon” (a color-coded display that signals when problems arise during the production process). That lack of understanding is one of the first impediments to implementing lean.
Even with a basic understanding that lean is a philosophy, not just a tool set, the concepts can often defy common business sense—for instance, the idea that small batch sizes are better in manufacturing. Myhrman was certainly a skeptic when, in the late 1980s, he had to create a customized lean production system based on Toyota’s approach for a division of Cummins Engine Co. “I thought, ‘No way—why would anybody want to do that?’” he says, citing the idea that employees had to take on extra work for no extra pay. But after seeing initial success with kanban, as well as noting how much more efficient the pull system was compared to the MRP system that the company had been using, he became a believer.
He also recalls his former trepidation when talking with clients about lean. “I sometimes expected them to say, ‘It’s not going to work here—it’s stupid, it’s crazy.’ In a sense, I don’t blame them— the ideas are counterintuitive,” he says. “People who have worked in a particular department all their lives will look at us and say, ‘You want me to do what? You want me to run another machine and finish the project?’”
While many skilled laborers may fear that lean initiatives will result in extra work or staff reductions, they also can be the company members most open to lean changes. “Most people in the trenches have been screaming for help for years and no one’s listened to them,” says Beau Keyte, a trainer with the nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute and president and founder of Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Branson Inc., a company that focuses on lean implementations, coaching, and facilitation. “Ninety-nine percent of these changes help them out.”
Still, some employees dig in their heels because of pride, territorialism, or pure obstinacy. Keyte recalls a 62-year-old scheduler who arranged for trucks to deliver goods from Vermont to places south. She used outdated maps which she didn’t let anyone else see, and she wouldn’t tell anyone else how she did her job. “She was probably the most dedicated employee in the company—and also its biggest liability,” says Keyte.
Managers, meanwhile, worry they’ll look bad or become obsolete when lean processes oust the old methods. “They don’t want to admit they’re not doing the best they can,” says Drew Locher, a principal with Mount Laurel, N.J.-based Change Management Associates, and coauthor with Keyte of The Complete Lean Enterprise: Value Stream Mapping for Administrative and Office Processes. “For them to change what they did admits a mistake.”
Talking about breaking up a department or group or empowering subordinates—which lean encourages—can make a manager feel threatened. One result: Middle managers can stand in the way of incorporating lean programming. Company leaders resist lean changes when the company is making profits, figuring: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And, if they do decide to apply lean methods, they often don’t realize that they too must get lean. “The assumption by traditional management is that they can institute change on the shop floor and that will be the end of it,” says the University of Wisconsin’s Peterson. “The reality is no, that’s not true—management also has to change.”
LEAVE THE LEGACY BEHIND
One big roadblock to lean implementation is a legacy system—a process that’s been in place for as long as current employees can remember. Because the system has worked in the past, folks are reluctant to change it.
Automatic Products, a St. Paul-based vending machine manufacturer, encountered some legacy issues when it implemented sweeping lean changes. “The culture of our company was one of limited change,” says CEO Scott Edgerton. “The average seniority here was about 25 years, and they hadn’t seen much change, so they thought the way they were doing things was the right way. They didn’t understand why we had to change, nor did they appreciate the need for change.”
But the vending machine industry was changing, and the company’s management recognized that lean methods would help them keep up. They cast around for a consultant that would recognize the specific challenges of the company’s culture. “I was worried about how the culture was going to accept it,” says Edgerton. “I was worried about upper management people, and worried about the people on the shop floor.”
Plus, there was a bargaining group to contend with. “The two main issues with the bargaining unit were job security and compensation,” says Peterson, who worked with Automatic Products to integrate lean processes.
The bargaining group understood the business reasons necessitating the lean changes, and was open to working with management on them. Management, for its part, respected their contract and established a governance committee to oversee lean implementation. The company also offered employees classes on how to cope with change. “Once we did the training, and people understood the concepts, they were willing to try something different,” says Edgerton, noting that during a “5S” standardized cleanup (a key aspect of lean implementation), the company threw out old equipment, some of which had been stored for nearly 20 years. “People started taking pride in the workplace. They enjoyed keeping things clean and showing them off.”
Later lean changes, including moving huge machines into different workspace areas and establishing work cells, made employees’ tasks easier. “We’ve achieved 30 percent labor reduction, achieved single-piece flow, greater flexibility, less line part shortages, and improved our quality,” says Edgerton. “Employees really opened their arms and embraced the concepts. It’s been a lot of fun watching them do this.”
TRIM THE FAT
While everyone agrees that a cultural change is essential for a successful lean transformation, a company’s culture won’t change on its own. Leadership and support from senior management is critical. “[Management] often doesn’t understand that you can’t just throw tools at a problem and expect it to be fixed,” says Keyte. Unless management is willing to stand up and understand its role in lean, the transformation will have no success.”
At Toyota, plant mangers and even the president run kaizen monthly to ferret out wasteful processes and suggest solutions. Anyone from any level of an organization can and should participate in kaizen, but it’s particularly important for a senior manager to give active support. Without it, the process may fail because it lacks the input of a change agent. Managers have to be active in other ways as well:
1. Get in the trenches
Walking the production floor, asking questions, and taking time to learn about internal processes are all essential to developing a standard for managerial actions. The more managers understand a process, the greater their ability to apply lean thinking. “In organizations that are really successful at lean, we get together, show them the tools, show them direction, give them some parameters, and then say, ‘Now, what can you guys do?’” says Ahlquist. “Getting them to buy in, getting their employees involved, and [becoming] owners of the process is key.”
2. Spell it out
To get employees to sign on, managers should lay out goals clearly in department-wide meetings. Communicating the purpose and process is just as important as demonstrating that the changes are going to benefit employees along the way—and that management will be supportive, as opposed to punitive.
3. Find a champion
Dave Baker, business development manager for Saint Paul College’s Customized Training & Consulting division and a specialist in Lean-Flow enterprise, encourages finding a “lean champion”—an individual within the company who will drive lean changes and ensure company-wide support and motivation. “A lean champion is very important,” he says. “There’s a tendency once you implement something new, a real strain or push to going back to doing things the old way.”
Sometimes, informal leaders can champion lean efforts best. A small manufacturing company in Minnesota instituted lean changes under Baker’s guidance. When he later asked who had lit the fire to make lean work, the president of the company pointed to the employee in charge of shipping. Why him? “He had the respect of other workers,” says Baker. “Plus, he had interactions with all the other departments.”
Other ways to get the participation of the workforce include culture surveys, which gauge what people are thinking at the start of lean implementation, change management workshops, and field trips to other businesses—even those in other industries— to see how they’re using lean. Stubborn employees and managers could come around after a lean simulation, in which a process is done the old way and then done using lean concepts to show the improved results. And having a mixed group of employees chart a business process as a value-stream map (see “On the Map,” above) helps them understand how to apply lean practices.
The more a company’s employees can learn about lean, the more likely lean changes will be accepted. And the more they immerse themselves in it by applying lean tools and philosophy, the more likely those changes will be sustained and the culture changed for good. “In the end, there are a lot of winners,” says Baker. “Employee jobs become better, working conditions become better, and there’s definitely more variety. Attitudes are better. Overall, lean is a really positive thing to have occur.”