Is there risk in deploying lean standard work?

 

Lean Nation, 

If you have followed previous blogs, I spend a lot of time talking about standard work. In my nearly 30 years of being active with lean management,  I have learned one thing. If you have worked with me in the past, you will know what I am about to say.

“ If you do not leave your improvement effort with standard work and supporting visual management, you are wasting your time. You will not sustain the improvements. Your culture will pull you back to status quo every time. It might be a week, or it might be six months, but the gains will evaporate”

I have written before why standards are critical. As a brief refresher, a standard is a basis for comparison. It allows us to compare one thing against another. Common standards used almost daily are time, weight, volume, and distance. With these standards we know which alternative travels a shorter distance or takes less time.

In the lean world a standard is our known best way to do something. It is like a recipe that we use to ensure the easiest, safest, shortest, highest quality, lowest risk, most value-added process is followed every single time.

Standard work has many benefits in the workplace including fostering a positive and productive work environment. Standard work also enables results to be more consistent by eliminating process variability. Well-defined standard work simplifies tasks for employees. This reduces errors and makes the work easier and safer. Having a standard allows continuous improvement to occur. We now have a baseline to compare one process versus another to evaluate “better.”  Standard work also assist in training new employees versus having a new employee follow an experienced employee around to share their tribal knowledge. Standards also allow for regular evaluation and refinement of procedures leading to better outcomes. Finally,  standard work provides a clear and consistent framework for behavior and performance expectations that can prevent conflict and misunderstandings, and in rare cases unethical practices.

In this blog, I wanted to look at the other side of the coin. What are risks of standard work? A search on the internet revealed the following risks to standard work.

 1)     Implicit Bias in Performance Evaluations

 This implies that performance evaluations can be judged by race, gender, etc. My opinion on this is standard work is color blind, gender-blind, etc. Standards are written in the lean world by employees for employees. A lean standard is  based on takt time, work sequence, standard work in process, and direct observation. It is 100% objective. If the standard was subjective, it is possible for bias to occur, but this is not remotely the case. So, this risk does not exist with lean standard work.

 2)     Lack of Leadership Support

Lean has an important role for leaders. In a lean organization, managers have three jobs:

·       Set and maintain standards

·       Improve standards

·       Develop people

Implementing standard work indeed requires commitment from leadership. Many failed transformations point to lack of consistency or poor accountability in ensuring standards are in place and followed. To mitigate this from happening there are many lean approaches that can be used to ensure standards are followed. The more common tools include:

-Leader standard work

·       -Tiered huddles

·       -Kamishibai – task audits

·       -Gemba walks

I am in agreement that management and leadership engagement is a standard work risk. This is what we must ensure we institute a complete lean management system to avoid back sliding on standards and performance.

3)  Feedback and Improvement Challenges  and Outdated Tools / Technologies

Standard work  can become outdated if there isn't a feedback and improvement loop. When standard work remains static, they may not adapt to changing circumstances or emerging best practices.

This is another real risk to. Many of the management system approaches we discussed to mitigate risk 2, apply to this risk as well. Specifically, I would encourage the use of managing for daily improvement to provide feedback on process and results and use the daily team huddle to continue to remove waste for the system. Using obsolete best practices can hinder performance so effort should be given to ensure the standard work is current and relevant.

4)     Standard Work is not relevant for the Modern Age

This risk comes from the changing work environments (e.g., remote work, digital collaboration). Traditional standard work may not fully address new challenges.

Candidly, if the work has changed the standard work should be updated. Takt time, cycle time, work balance all change when the workplace (physical or virtual) change. This risk is only  relevant if leaders and management fail to update the standard work to the new workflow.

 My executive summary of standard work  and the associated risk would be as follows:

1)    Standard work actually eliminates bias in the workplace by making standards consistent for all staff. Evaluation of performance can now be 100% objective based on output generated from following lean standard work.

2)    Management and leadership have a role in setting, maintaining, and improving standards. If the spirit of lean leadership is maintained,  accountability frameworks will be in place to mitigate  the risk of failing to follow standards.

3)     The broader elements of a lean management system must be implemented to ensure standard work is relevant and updated to changing demand, customer requirement, emerging best practices, etc.

4)     Old standard work is not designed for the digital workforce. Standard needs to be updated to support the work environment, physical or virtual. Standard work should be written by the people that do work and it should be reflective the new digital workflows as necessary.

Keeping standard work current and thriving is one of the two necessary ingredients of lean success. The other being the supporting visual management. As I have discussed, there are some challenges that come with keeping standard work up to date. The benefits that come from having standard work far, however, far exceed the risk of not having it.

Is your standard work current, and improving?    Go take a look and see if any of the challenges above impact your organizations ability to be their best!

 Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw,  President and Sensei

Breakthrough Horizons

www.breakthroughhorizons.com   

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ron-bercaw-882a0a8/