Category Archives: Lean CX

Lean Management For White Collar Work – DO NOT Be Fooled By Well Meaning Consultants

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Lean Management white collar

When it comes to Lean Management in general, there is a lot of mis-information and mal-practice out there in the world.  After all, Lean Management and operational excellence sound good at face value.  If it’s been well defined, it will look like “Quality, Delivery, and Cost” – improving quality and tasks being first-time-right, improving delivery times and getting things to customers (and team-mates) faster, and reducing cost.  But most companies and leaders don’t even get that far.

Add to this another challenge – that being a manager often involves many parts of a business, not just manufacturing.

These are areas in your business that need Lean Management too – like technology, software or website development, customer service, sales, administration, human resources, quality assurance, projects, training, change programs, communications and much more.  They can all benefit from the right approach and start to improve on those Lean Management measures of “Quality, Delivery and Cost”.  But it just can’t be done using the old Lean Manufacturing way.

So buyer beware – Lean is traditionally a manufacturing methodology, and few (if any) leaders have gotten it right when applying it to the other important parts of a business – parts that are considered “white collar”.

Every company, even if they are primarily in manufacturing, has these white collar areas to be managed and apply true Lean Management to.  Sales have to be made, scheduling has to be done, items have to be handed between departments, customers have to be served.

So how do we adjust this decades-old approach to a white collar world to achieve real success?  Simple – we strip the principles of Lean and operational excellence back to their core, to the outcome they are trying to achieve, and take the parts that give us a meaningful result as leaders and applying true Lean Management.

Five Steps to Lean Management for White Collar Work

Before we define Lean Management for white collar work, traditional manufacturing Lean is based on a handful of solid principles, most commonly shown like this:

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A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

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This is a powerful definition of Operational Excellence, how it relates to Customer Obsession and has a huge impact on revenue, profit and employee engagement.  You can download a PDF version for yourself, free.  Enjoy!

 

A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

Operational Excellence.  It’s a term most of us have heard, maybe even used, but when it comes down to it few people know what it really, truly means.  Operational Excellence certainly sounds like something we should want – after all, everyone would say they want their business or team to operate well, and we want it to be excellent rather than average, right?

We need Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence is important enough for Jeff Bezos (the richest man in the world and the CEO of Amazon.com) to mention repeatedly in his shareholder letters, so there has to be some value in it.  And let me ruin the ending for you here – because when it comes to well defined operational excellence there is massive value indeed.

It’s a strategy that has helped Amazon become the most feared (and revered) business of the century so far – sending whole industries running for cover at the slightest mention of working there.  It’s a strategy that helped Toyota thrive for over 100 years in one of the toughest industries on earth.  It’s a strategy that took McDonald’s from one store to over 36,000 stores worldwide, and it’s a strategy that enabled Uber to grow to more than 2,000,000 drivers worldwide.  Bezos says:

Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day with unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence.

 

The thing is, when Jeff Bezos talks about customer obsession, he’s not talking about meeting a customer at a cash register and giving them a smile.  He’s talking about reducing any friction a customer might have in doing business with Amazon.com, and making it ridiculously easy for them to buy (and continue to buy) from them.

Which gives us some good news.  When it comes to Customer Obsession and Operational Excellence, those two things are 100% related.

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Lean CX Vlog 002 – DESIGN YOUR WORK

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Are you unhappy in your job?  Do you hate your work?  Is your life boring?  I’ve got something that you may find controversial, and if this is you I want to say that it’s NOT your fault.  Your leader has not intentionally designed your work for ease of use and engagement – probably because they don’t know how.

So the question is – if they’re not going to lead, then who is?  And the answer is YOU.  YOU are the leader your team needs to get intentional about designing your work for ease of use and engagement, and when you do, no matter what industry or work type you are in, you will start enjoying those 8 to 12 hours everyday we call “Work”.

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Transcript:

David McLachlan:  It’s an absolutely beautiful morning in the city, this is gonna be a great ride.  But I really want to talk to you about something super important, in fact one thing that we haven’t really spoken about over the last couple of videos is a little thing called designing your work.

Like I said I really want to talk to you about designing your work, and more specifically designing your work for ease of use.  So what does it mean to design your work?  Well think about it from this perspective.  Have you
ever had to call a company, or deal with another department in your company, and you can just tell they don’t really know what they’re doing?  You know, they have to redo things over and over again, they have to hand off to another department or another person, there’s a lot of waiting in between steps and the person that you’re dealing with or even a team or another department, and the person that you’re dealing with is just dragging their feet and everything is too hard for them.  And all of this grates on the experience.

So pretty soon you’re not wanting to do business with these people or this
company because of all of this extra friction, and it’s quite obvious that they don’t like their job.  I’m gonna say something a little bit controversial and that is it’s not their fault.  It’s actually because their process and their work has not been intentionally designed for ease of use.  Because when you design your process in your work and your job for ease of use you’re making things easy naturally so then it wouldn’t matter these things would be easy for that person to do, whether they were having a good day or a bad day.  And we all have bad days but there’s absolutely no excuse for having a bad process.

So why is it important to design your work, and specifically design for ease of use?  Well, a recent study found that more than 50% of people in their jobs
actually don’t know what’s expected of them at work.  And because of that they’re not doing the best job that they can do.  And of course out of those people who don’t really know what’s expected of them at work there’s a higher proportion of people who are disengaged in their work – just like that person we were talking about before who’s dragging their feet and everything’s too
hard.  These are everyday people trying to do a good job but they may not
necessarily be able to, because it hasn’t been made clear what is expected.  The outcomes and the steps have not been made clear.

Disengaged workers  – the impact that has on your business is, their sales rates are lower their productivity is lower.  Happiness has a big impact on your bottom line.  Now look at it from the other perspective as well.  Recent research by Stanford University actually found 35 percent was the difference in results of people who had clear outcomes and people who had not clear outcomes at all.  Teams and companies that didn’t have clear outcomes actually performed 35% worse than people and teams and companies that
did have clearly articulated outcomes and clearly designed steps to get there.

Now there’s another study as well that was done on happiness and flow, and it’s by a great man called Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, and in the 1960s he took a thousand people and interviewed them when they found the most happiness
and meaning in their lives and there were a handful of things, but three of
the most prominent were they had control over the outcome when they were doing the task, they had a clear objective when they were doing the task, just like the Stanford University study and just like the Gallup study as well, and the task gave immediate feedback.  Now all of these things are actually part of the
ease-of-use framework which I’m going to share with you over the next couple of videos.  So everything is starting to tie together all of the research is pointing in a very very very similar direction, and that direction is making sure that we’re clearly articulating things, intentionally designing the work, and
designing it specifically for ease of use.

Now I’m going to go into the five steps of the ease-of-use framework in other
videos but really quickly they are: making your process repeatable so it’s
the same great repeatable process every time, reducing those steps to a customer getting what they want, making it visuals so they can see exactly what to do first time without having to ask, making it impossible to make a mistake and checking in so that we know whether they got what they want or not.

So where do we go from here?  A very simple thing that you can do straight up is just simply write out the steps that you take to perform a few of the tasks in your work and then try and reduce those steps so by reducing the steps you are actually reducing the complexity making things easier just straight off the bat just doing those two things alone will have a massive impact on your business and the rest of it comes down to the ease-of-use framework which I absolutely cannot wait to share with you over the next coming videos.

I hope to see you then, chat soon.

David McLachlan

The CX Card Deck

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Below is a 52 card deck of Customer Experience tricks, tips, models, frameworks, psychology and research, specially designed as a cheat sheet for you to use in meetings, as ice breakers, or to help make moves in your company.  You can buy the Customer Experience Card Deck now, printed on beautiful, strong, linen paper and delivered anywhere in the world.  A great way to brainstorm UX and CX solutions, they are the absolute best cards I have ever seen, so I know you will enjoy them.

         w-CX_Card_006_Reduce Customer Effort                                        CX_Card_027_Contagious 3 Emotion                   CX_Card_037_Slightly Worse Version               CX_Card_045_LCX Wastes 4 ExcessiveSteps              

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What Is Lean CX?

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You can recognise disruptors before they become a reality.

Lean CX is a step by step framework for Operational Excellence and how it relates to disruptive companies and technologies – especially as they grow and are ready to scale.

Disruptive companies are those that can deliver something a customer wants faster, cheaper, with better quality and sufficient brand recognition.  Think McDonald’s in the 1950s, the model T Ford in the early 1900s, the Apple iPod in the early 2000s or the iPhone in 2007, Uber disrupting the cab industry, Netflix disrupting DVD hire and Amazon disrupting retail.

All of them have at least three of these four in common:

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Leadership Card 21 – Core Human Needs, Significance and Connection

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Engineering Happiness In your Team With Significance and Connection

There’s a funny thing about happiness.  We all seem to want it, and yet so many times we do things that we know don’t bring us happiness in the long run, don’t we?

That extra piece of chocolate cake, or spending too much time working instead of bonding with friends or partners (which was, incidentally, one of the top five regrets of the dying).  Not exercising or being outdoors enough.  it all adds up.

But there could be a very good reason for us missing the mark when it comes to performing happiness improving activities – and that is because the real core needs that drive us are actually conflicting.

In the last card, Leadership Card 19, we saw that we deeply crave certainty in our lives, but also variety.  And the more variety we have, the less certainty we have.  Well it’s the same with Leadership Card 20, where we crave significance and connection, but the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

Significance and Connection – At Odds With Each Other

You see, to be significant you have to stand out.  You have to lead the pack, often be different to others.  And people get significance in different ways.  They can feel significant by performing really well, earning lots of money, moving up in their career, or they can feel significant by being difficult, causing trouble to get attention, and other ways like that.

But when we stand out and are different, it’s much harder to fit in, to feel that connection and bonding with people in a team, a family, a friendship group or anywhere else.

So while we crave both, significance and connection are hard to engineer together.

Engineering Both In Your Team’s Work

So how do we create both in our team’s work?  Part of Lean CX and the Ease of Use framework is a thing called “Checking In”, where we check in with our team members at least once a week, see where we need to adjust, and then focus on their strengths.

Doing this ensures two things – first, we build that connection by checking in, making sure they know they are on our radar as a leader and that we care about their path and their progress.

But then we focus on their strengths, building that significance of individuality, because we are all slightly different at the end of the day and have individual strengths and things we want to achieve.

So check in with your team, and focus on their strengths.  Even research from Gallup on employee engagement has shown that it can improve engagement by up to 27%.  And employees who are more engaged have higher productivity, sales, profit, and lower absenteeism and turnover.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 20 – Certainty and Variety, Deep Human Needs

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Give Your Team Happiness, By Meeting Their Core Needs

Happiness.  People want it, talk about it, reminisce about it, and miss it when it’s not there.  And it can be everything from instant gratification (like a big meal) to deep meaning in a person’s life (like having meaningful work).

Seeing as anyone can eat a big meal or piece of chocolate and get instant gratification, I’m going to talk about the deeper meaning, that you can actually engineer into your team’s work to make them happier, more productive, and ultimately want to do a good job.

In fact, one study I found for the Lean CX Score book showed that people perform around 12% better simply by being happy.

Anthony Robbins’ Six Human Needs

You’ve probably heard of a few different types of “Needs hierarchies”, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that goes from safety to self-actualization.  But in the 1990s Anthony Robbins came up with a deep set of human needs that completely make sense, because they actually conflict with each other.

They make sense because in a way we are all striving for happiness, and  the ebb and flow of life, and events that happen over time make it either easy to get or elusive.

The first combination of needs are Certainty and Variety.

Certainty and Variety

We need certainty that what we do will turn out OK.  Some people need more certainty than others before they do something, and others need no certainty at all.

The only problem is, having certainty conflicts with our other need, which is to have variety in our life and work.  After all, if we have a lot of certainty, doing the same thing in the same way every day, then we don’t have a lot of variety.  but if we have a lot of variety – spontaneous things, ideas, and outings – then we don’t have as much certainty.

And yet we need them both for fulfilling work.

How Can We Engineer Both Into Our People’s Work?

Over the years, I’ve experienced a few ways to engineer both of these things into a team’s work.  The best ones I’ve seen involve this:

  • Having clear outcomes, and a clear path or process to get there (certainty)
  • Allowing (and encouraging) our team to problem solve ways to improve that work regularly (giving variety)

Not everyone is a natural problem solver.  It can be hard to work through uncertain territory, and that is why it helps to have a standard process for problem solving and improving our work, making it easier to use.

The Lean CX Score is that framework that improves the ease of use and engages your team at the same time.  Using things like a repeatable process, error proofing, visual management and checking in, you can go a long way to building the meaning back into your team’s life and work, no matter what they are doing.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 18 – Engineering Flow and a Clear Objective

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Engineering The State of Flow, and Happiness

In the late 60s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed 1000 people on what makes them happy.  He found a few main things that, when present, can engineer what he called the state of “flow”, when you are lost in the moment, time flies, and you feel like you could do a task forever.

In the Leadership Card Deck we’ve seen a few different studies that have shown that a clear objective can make a huge difference to your team’s results.  And creating a clear path for your team with a repeatable process that is easy to use can increase those results again.

But there is more to this story when it comes to increasing the engagement and happiness of your teams.  And it’s because of this:

Have you ever been in a situation where what you did had absolutely no effect on the outcome?  Take this as an example – imagine you were driving a car, and trying to get to a destination, but when you turned the steering wheel it had no effect on the path you took.  In other words, the action you took had no bearing on whether you made it there or not.

A lot of teams are operating like that car ride today, because even if they have taken a step above everyone else and clearly articulated the objective and the process to get there and made it ridiculously easy to do, if your team’s actions have no effect on getting to that objective they will lose interest very quickly.  And losing interest is the absolute opposite of a state of Flow.

Working Towards A Clear Objective, With Control Over The Outcome

Mihali isn’t the only one to have found this in his studies.  In research brought to light via Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, he found that one of the best motivators wasn’t money or rewards, it was actually a thing called “Mastery”, which he described like this:

“Working continuously towards mastering a worthy skill.”

So we have a fairly ideal set up here, and this is only the start of it.  All the research is pointing in the same direction.  In Leadership Card 10, we saw that tying outcomes to a higher meaning had a huge effect on the happiness of your team.  So if we have a clear objective, where our team’s actions have control over the outcome, and those outcomes are tied to a higher meaning or purpose, then we start to see the ideal situation for engineering happiness and flow in the work that they do.

What Happens Next?

And what happens next when your team can effortlessly perform their work and it is working towards something meaningful?  Well, they enjoy coming to work much more than they thought possible.  It stops being just about the paycheck.  And the effects of high engagement show profit can go up by 17%, revenue can be doubled, absenteeism and sick days can go down by 40%, and much, much more.

Enjoying yourself at work takes a little bit of awareness – awareness that is not taught at school and is not present in most leaders who work their way up through the ranks.  But creating this scenario at work has a big payback, and doing even a little bit will show you just how powerful it can be.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 17 – Engineering Flow, Intensely Focused on an Activity

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How Would You Like To Play Video Games For A Living?

No matter how old you are – teen, millennial, Gen Y, X or Baby Boomer, I can pretty much guarantee there was a time in your life when you played some sort of a video game.  Maybe it was on your mobile phone just the other day, maybe it was on one of the original consoles like Atari in the 1980s, maybe it was more sophisticated like the PlayStation or XBox, or maybe it was just plain old solitaire on Windows.  The point is, it was fun, and you could easily get lost in the moment (which turned into moment-s) while playing it.

That’s the thing about games.  Because of their very nature they naturally engineer the state of “flow” in people participating in it – that state where time flies, you get into a rhythm, and you’re so engaged you forget to eat.

And with the state of flow – it can actually be engineered into your work to make it more game-like in its systems, through the process, the feedback, and the way the work is performed.

It’s Not Quite Playing Candy Crush All Day

Now this doesn’t mean we’re literally playing Candy Crush all day and getting paid for it – when I say more game-like I’m talking about the way the work is structured to engineer the state of flow, and help the work get done with more engagement from your team.

So we’re looking at the mechanisms behind games, not games themselves, and how they are addictive because they create this state in people.

Flow Model – The First Tip – Make it Repeatable 

The first part of the Flow Model is creating work for your team that is neither too easy, nor too hard.  This means getting right in there and creating the rules of the game – a repeatable process that can be done the same way every time (or used as a guideline for work that is wildly different, complex or creative).

Because you know what?  Most leaders never clearly articulate the rules of the game – the outcomes, the path to get there, and regular check ins to see if we’re on that path.  Can you imagine playing a game – whether it’s football outside or a video game inside – and not knowing the rules to the game?  It wouldn’t last very long, and that is exactly what is happening with your teams.

When creating that work process, it’s also really important to look at the ways we can make it easier to do – to improve the “Ease of Use” of that process.  By improving the ease of use we are making it easier for our people to fall into a natural rhythm and state of flow, and not be interrupted by making mistakes, having to check how to do something, having to wait for someone else, or multitasking between too many things.

That’s what we mean in this first step by “performing a task, that is neither too easy nor too hard”.

Most leaders never get to this step in their leadership.  

Putting out fires unfortunately becomes a routine part of their day.  They don’t understand that you have to engineer the work – design the work – and design it specifically for ease of use.

Now look at it the other way.  Your best staff – the ones you love and the ones who “naturally” do a good job.  There’s nothing natural about it at all – in order to get good at something, any star performer has simply figured out, most likely through trial and error, the best way that flows naturally for them to do something.  They’ve experienced the errors, so they know how to avoid them.  They know the sticking points, so they know how to approach them.   To learn something – anything – humans have to create and strengthen neural pathways in our brains by doing something over and over.

What I’m asking you to do is to do better for your team.  Help them design their work and the process.  Make the objective clear and make the path clear, and help make it easy to do before they have to go through all that figuring out themselves.

In doing so, I absolutely guarantee you will see some incredible results.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 16 – What Workers Want

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It’s Not About The Money (Money, Money)

Apart from being the lyrics to a catchy tune in 2011 by Jessie J, it turns out it really isn’t all about the money when it comes to your team and the people within your business.

When Richard Florida took the responses to an information week survey and filtered them for the things that made people want to do a good job, even he was surprised.  Having “Challenge and Responsibility” came in at number one, where a person is given autonomy in completing a task that isn’t too boring for them.  Flexibility came in number two, and job stability at number three – and these two things match up with other studies and research you will see in these Leadership Cards, such as Anthony Robbins’ six human needs where Variety and Comfort are both necessary to our happiness, even though they can be conflicting.

After all of those things, came money at number four.  Yes, we need money to eat, pay the mortgage, put the kids through school and go on date nights with our partner, but it turns out people put a lot of things ahead of it when it comes to their happiness at work.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivators

You see, there is a very large difference in motivating factors within your team.  Sure, there are the obvious ones, like them getting up in the morning and going to work because you’re paying them.  Money and other physical benefits – something external to that person – are known as extrinsic motivators.

But have you ever done something for someone else just because?   Without the need for money and without the need for something in return?  Chances are you’ve experienced an intrinsic motivating force, where you are compelled to do something because it gives you an internal payoff.  Things like working back extra time because you like your leader, or the things you do for your kids or your family or your friends, or perhaps creating something like a drawing or piece of music.

Daniel Pink found three main intrinsic motivators in his book “Drive”.  they occurred when a person had:

  1. Autonomy: Where they are given free reign in solving a problem
  2. Mastery: Where they can work continuously towards mastering a worthy skill
  3. Purpose: Where they are contributing to something greater than themselves

Can you find a way to engineer these into your own work and process?  If you can, the results just might surprise you.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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