Establishing Lean Culture
Moving the Culture Forward - Stay the course with Lean
In the beginning steps of your lean journey, not everyone will be on board and walking the journey alongside you. That's no one's fault either. It just takes time to educate everyone in the plant. Kaizen events are limited in that you can train only a handful of employees at a time - meanwhile others are left guessing. That is why continued plantwide communication and ongoing dialogue are so important for lean success. You want to directly communicate to employees and develop lean disciples. Lean disciples will be your voice in the breakrooms and on the shopfloor when you are not around. Lean disciples help to carry the lean message and to establish the lean culture.
You can gage your lean success and your culture transformation by monitoring these three subtle indicators:
- Answer questions. Don't forget about the suggestion/feedback box that you posted. Review these comments every month and address them at plantwide meetings. Don't expect them to all be great ideas or constructive comments. You will receive some negative feedback about lean and that is fine. You are trying to encourage engagement and also just gaging the plant "vibe". You don't need to address any disrespectful comments that you received. I promise that you will see the negative comments diminish over time as you continue on your lean journey. Your "plant vibe" is a subtle but solid indicator of progress.
- Win the breakroom debates. When you center your lean program around the plant operators by making their job easier and more efficient through kaizens, then you will win the breakroom lean debates. Operators will start to defend lean and promote the benefits of lean as they have personally experienced it. When these conversations happen in the breakrooms, it means that your operators won, your company won, your customers won, lean won, and you won. Your "breakroom vibe" is a subtle but solid indicator of progress.
- Employees request kaizens. When I was an OpEx Manager, I was thrilled when operators around the company approached me and asked me when they were scheduled to have a kaizen event on their process. They were excited to have their voice heard and have improvements made. When company employees requested events, then I knew that lean won in the breakrooms and our snowball of success would be unstoppable. I was always correct in this assumption. When employees request kaizens, you are on your way to becoming a world-class lean facility. Kaizen requests are a subtle but solid indicator of progress.
In the past, I have seen Lean help companies exceed all of their established safety, quality, service, productivity and cost targets. Company profits would always overachieve corporate expectations too. Lean methods created excess floor space and thus it makes new space available for growth and new product lines. Thanks to lean manufacturing, the sky is the limit and factory life gets good. Lean undoubtable works and lean success begins by establishing a lean culture. Monitor the lean culture in your plant, let it spread like wildfire and win with bottom-line results.
Commit. Kaizen. Continue.
Stay connected with news and updates!
If you want some weekly T4T wisdom coming straight to your inbox for your reading pleasure - look no further! Join our mailing list to receive the latest blogs and updates.
Don't worry, your information will not be shared.
We hate SPAM. We will never sell your information, for any reason.
