92 - Measuring Personal Performance

Do you ever have days where you have a plan to do something in particular, but when you start to work on it, you think maybe there's something different you should be doing?  That's me this morning.  More on that in a minute but first...

I want to wish my son, Matthew, a Happy 30th Birthday today.  He's on his way to Texas to get lost at big Bend National Park with his little brother.  I know they'll have a blast and I wish I could have gone with them. 

Other than that, I'm struggling a little with what to talk about this morning.  I had planned to wrap up a conversation I started last week about visual management systems.  The plan was to talk about measuring quality and cost at different tiers, but I made the mistake of stepping on the scale to measure my own weight and was disappointed with the result. 

Since the pandemic began, I've managed to gain about 15 pounds.  This despite being home most of the time; despite still walking a bunch.  Sadly, I've also eaten voraciously with lots of delivered and take out food - often not the healthiest.

Part of my initial strategy for this webcast was to mix up topics with leadership, lean thinking, travel, and personal development.  I've pretty much left off the personal development piece, so I think I'm going to fix that starting today and ask a big favor from all of you.

I'm going to set a target weight of 190 lbs.  I have an app that actually says my "normal" weight is between 132.2 and 178.6, but I in 2018 I managed to get as low as 186 and I thought I looked like I was a patient dying of something horrible.  What I will ask of you is encouragement and accountability.

Just like with what you measure at work, you have results metrics and process metrics.  I usually use weight loss as an example of the difference.  My target weight is set so that's my result metric.  I don't expect to hit that target for about 6 months.  So I need an intermediate target that will make this more manageable. 

The intermediate target is 1.5 pounds per week.  So I'll get on the scale every Friday and check to see if I've lost my 1.5 pounds.  But that's not a process metric, it's still an after-the-fact result metric.  If all I do is weigh myself, I can't see making much progress - same applies at work.

The process metric involves how I plan to lose this weight.  I don't ever stick to fad diets, so the rule is simply, consume fewer calories and burn more calories.  Eat Less.  Move more.

So I'm working on the details of those daily targets, particularly with walking because I want to get back to my half-marathon challenge as soon as the pandemic is over.

Help me stick to it, please.  I've done this 3 times before in private.  I know exactly what works, but the mind games work hard on me so I really think I need your help this time around.

Thanks in advance!

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow!

90 - Productivity

How do you know if your team is as productive as possible?

I've seen some weird calculations for productivity in businesses.  Most of the time, it depends on who is doing the measuring.

Since we're talking about visual management systems and productivity as a measure for the team, we have to think clearly about what our team members need to know about productivity and delivery.

We have to know our team's output.  What is it that they produce and deliver to customers?  What are they supposed to accomplish every day?

Everyone assembles some type of product, even if it's an information product like a report to your boss.  In places where you only do that once a month, how do you know if you're being productive every day?

It comes down to daily targets set by the leaders.  These targets will break down the product or service to a daily chunk of work, then we'll measure our progress against that target.

In the easy case, my team needs to produce 24 scopes today, in one 8 hour shift.  Our target output is 24, but it'll help me keep pace if I break that down to 3 per hour.  I can check every hour now to see if we're on track to hit the target.  If the plan is 24 and the actual is 24, in its simplest form, that's 100% productivity.

Setting those targets isn't arbitrary though.  The target needs to be based on actual demand, and the team needs to be staffed to complete the work assigned.  If it takes the team longer than 20 minutes to complete that scope on average, they'll never be able to keep pace and hit the target.

I have all kinds of ways to help you determine your demand, your pace, and your targets that will give you truthful information and help you make better decisions.  I've done this with government offices, with manufacturers of everything from steel to apparel, with insurance providers, fast food retailers, warehouses, and hospitals.

Call me and let me help you build a more productive team.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

89 - Measuring Safety

What should you measure for safety?

Last week, we aired an episode about getting started with visual management.  To me, the only thing that makes this easier is if everyone knows the purpose behind the system.  Visual management systems are a countermeasure to some problem the organization has and wants to solve.

When we're clear about the purpose:  Improve employee engagement; Improve work flow; improve communication channels; it's easier to talk to team members about how they can contribute to the success of the system.  There's something in it for them.

The things we measure have to be meaningful for the team.  That means that all team members understand how their actions move the needle on any particular measure.

Safety should be your number one metric.  But how do you make this meaningful for people?  Sure everyone wants a safe work environment, but what are the team members doing to improve safety?  What are they doing to reduce the risk of an accident or incident?  What are they doing to prevent the spread of COVID-19?

Some companies will roll safety in with their 5 S stuff and call it 6S.  I guess it sounds like success, but what I've seen is that very few back it up in any tangible way. 

If you're only counting recordables and near misses, you're trying to move forward by looking in the rear-view mirror. 

So what should you be doing?

I recommend including everyone in your behavior-based safety program that involves doing a safety observation of a particular area.  Make a plan for who will do an observation in the team area and track whether people are staying on the plan by completing their observations on time.  If you include everyone, you'll end up teaching everyone how to look for specific hazards that they might not notice working away every day.

Assign them to observe in an area where they don't typically work everyday.  Have them record their observations as answers to specific questions on their safety observation card.  Then if their observation includes nothing to draw attention to or repair, then the green side of the card is displayed in the safety area of the board.  If there IS an observation, everyone needs to be empowered to stop the work there immediately and work together to remove the threat/hazard.  If it's something that can't be fixed right away, make sure you have a clear process for escalating.

I've seen this in far too many places, where they'll do an observation and turn the card in to the EHS guy but no action ever comes from it.  If that's the case, you're wasting everyone's time. 

People are too valuable to not manage the risk in the workplace.  If you need some help setting something up, I can help.  Send me a message or give me a call.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

86 - Getting started with Visual Management

Good morning!

Are you wondering how to get started with a new or modified visual management system and the team huddles that go along with them?

What do you measure?   What do you display?  How do you get people to care about the boards?   How do you get people to care about the huddles?

It can be a lot of hard work for leaders.  I don't want to sugar coat this. 

The most important aspect of visual management and huddles is understanding why you want to incorporate them into your workplace or work life. 

You need to understand what problem you are trying to solve with this.

To me, the most important reason to do all this is to allow all employees to feel more involved in what's going on at work and give them a system where they can become engaged. 

Why that?  Because we need engaged employees to help us see and solve future problems, to share new ideas, and to develop the skills they will need to be future leaders.

How do you start?  You'll need some specific measures.  Usually there will be a set that includes a metric for People, Safety, Productivity or Delivery, Quality, Service, and Cost.

The general question for all of these metrics is "what do people need to know?"  This isn't about what the leaders need to know, but this will play directly into metrics at higher tiers. 

"What do the people in the huddle at tier 1 need to know?" 

1. They need to know if their team is here or if they can expect more work because they're short handed today.  So we MEASURE Attendance.
 

2. They need to know if special events, training, or future vacations are going to affect them.  So we have a 3-month rolling calendar people can write on.
 

3. They need to know what they are expected to do that day.  What are the targets for production or service delivery - How many widgets am I expected to make or how many customers should I expect to see today? 
 

4. They need to know that the problems they had yesterday (or earlier) are solved or are being solved if they aren't personally involved.
 

5. For other things, ask them!  

a. Many will want to know how they are doing with customer satisfaction, so you will want some quality measure of their work. 

b. Many will want to know how the company is doing financially - especially if there's a gainshare or bonus structure they will benefit from with higher profitability. 

c. Others will want to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, babies, promotions, or recognition team members have received.

I'll start today with People and the simplest thing you can do to begin bringing people in - Measure attendance at the huddles.

Sounds silly to take attendance, but the way it should work is that each team member has to interact with the board to mark that they are here.  We do this to build the habit of coming to the huddle, picking up a marker, and putting a green dot next to your name.

But that alone will just be annoying, so you have to offer a challenge.  You have to offer something like: "If we have 100% attendance for a month, there's a reward for the team."  The reward can be an office pot luck, but that's pretty much a non-starter in COVID world, or it could be that everyone gets a $5 Starbucks or Walmart gift card. 

Give out the reward as soon as it’s earned.  Don’t wait til the end of the year to reward perfect attendance in February.

For longer periods of 100% attendance, you offer larger rewards. 

Don't forget though, that the purpose you are after is to get them to care about the huddle.  So the other things you measure and talk about in the huddle have to matter to them. 

I'll talk about them over the next few days.  If you need any help with this, send me a message or give me a call.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

65 - Learning New Stuff

I've been spending this morning learning some new stuff instead of preparing for my normal episode for you on Facebook Live.

The things I'm learning are all about measurement systems:  How can we make ourselves more profitable by the way we measure the way work progresses through a system?

I'm sure once I discover and learn more about this, I can talk more intelligently about it and we'll have a couple of good conversations about it.

Till then, what I want to do is encourage you to go and pick something for you to learn today.  Once you learn something, it doesn't really do any good unless it either changes your behavior or you share it with somebody else.

All learning is relational.  If we all just sit back and learn by ourselves, it's not really doing much.

So go learn something new, share it with somebody else, or teach it to somebody else and then keep going.  Find something to learn tomorrow and the next day.  There's plenty out there, believe me.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

-DSV

64 - Measuring Quality for Better Results

If you're not getting the results you want, it's probably because you're measuring the wrong things.

One of the things I do in my coaching and consulting business is help companies define measures and build visual management systems.  Contact me and let's have a chat.  I can help.

Since the theme for this month is Let Go, one of the main systems that allows a leader to let go is an effective visual management system. 

Yesterday I mentioned a measurement system, and that measurement system is the heart of that effective visual management system. 

Today, let's focus on measuring quality.

Whatever kind of work you do, there should be some way to measure the quality of your results.  In some environments, that's often hard to see. 

The very best measures are always objective measures - those that are easy to see.  In manufacturing it's usually easy because you have a product to put together and measure to see if it meets the customer's requirements. 

In other environments, you may have to shift your thinking a little to recognize that where ever you produce some kind of product or service, you can measure the product against a customer requirement.  It might be a contract, or a purchase order, or a reimbursement request, or a query to a database, or breakfast at a restaurant, or the education of a student, or spraying a house for bugs. 

How you measure that quality component needs to reflect the quality of the PROCESS as well as the quality of the PRODUCT.  We have to be able to see where the weaknesses in the product and process design are so we can prevent problems from occurring. 

Sadly, our first instinct when quality is poor is to blame the person closest to the error, yell at them or figuratively slap their wrists and tell them to do better or else.

If instead we examine the process and ask "how can we prevent this error from ever happening to anyone again?"  then our thinking will be in the right place. 

So whatever you measure and post in your visual system should encourage people to share when they make a mistake and where the process is difficult.  That's probably not going to happen if you measure defects in "parts per million."

Your measures also need to be easy to collect so you don't burn good, productive time just collecting data to update your board and your database.

Send me your questions about measuring quality and I'll post an update soon.

Have a great day and I'll see you tomorrow.

63 - Does Your Measurement System Matter?

Good morning!

Another month has flown by.  It seems like July and August were only a week instead of a month!

For September, our theme is Let Go. Remember, July was Love.  August was Learn.  These three
themes have come from my Integral Leadership Model that I wrote about in my book Leadersights.  These are the 3 key decisions leaders make every day to become more effective.

Throughout this month, I will try to show you how the topics everyday relate back to your decision as a leader to let go of your need to control everything; to let go of your need to be comfortable; to let go of your need know everything. 

The bottom line is that control is an illusion anyway.  With as complex as most systems are, it's impossible for any one person to control everything.  But it is still important that we feel like we have some control over our immediate environment.

If we can put some sub-systems in place, we can secure that feeling. 

One of the most common is a measurement system.  You're used to these at work.  Some of you have key performance metrics that you post everyday.  Others continue to have big Monthly Management Review meetings that stretch for hours at a time to give the leaders the feeling that things are in control.

A lot of the metrics I see in workplaces are largely ineffective.  I want to be measured by the things that I can actually control.  Otherwise, the measurement is arbitrary.  We have tons of software in workplaces now that can display all kinds of real-time data, but they end up just being a thermometer.  It tells us how hot or cold it is, but since I can't do anything about the weather, I don't really care and it doesn't drive my behavior.

As we go through this month, I'll focus on different kinds of measures and metrics for different kinds of things in the workplace.  Things like Safety, Quality, Delivery, Productivity, and Cost show up in lots of places, but where the data come from and how we use the data can either make them useless or highly effective.

I hope you'll share some of your measurement experiences with me as we go through the month.  If we measure the right things, we can let go without losing that overall feeling of control that gives us confidence to try new things.  If we measure the wrong things, we end up feeling stressed out and out of control.  It's hard to come up with new ideas if you're so stressed out that you can't think.

If you need to tweak your measurement system to make it more effective, please give me a call.  Together, we can create something that will make things more satisfying and effective at work.

Let's make September an awesome, safe, healthy, and prosperous month.

Have a great day, and I'll see you tomorrow.