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:

1. Specify Value (from the customer’s point of view)
2. Map the value chain
3. Improve Flow (by reducing Waste)
4. Pull work, don’t push
5. Continuously improve for perfection

It suits manufacturing well, and many Lean Management consultants have used it with varying levels of success.  I’ve written a book on it, and the approach itself has been around for decades.

White collar Lean Management for the rest of your business benefits from a modified approach.  It centers on designing your work specifically for feedback and to reveal improvements, to facilitate continuous improvement.  Now Lean Management looks more like this:

1. Make it Repeatable (Repeatable Process)
2. Check in
3. Reduce the steps to your customer getting what they want, by;
4. Error proofing, and;
5. Making it Visible

There are very specific reasons for you to lead this way using Lean Management, and all of those reasons are based on deep research on employee engagement, motivation, productivity and getting the most from your people as a leader.

Make It Repeatable

Did you know that nearly 51% of employees don’t know what is expected of them at work?  That figure might shock you so let me repeat: half of your employees are not clear on what is expected of them in your business.

And what do you think happens when employees aren’t clear on what to do?

That’s right – less gets done.  Productivity goes down.  Motivation goes down.  Employee engagement goes down.  This isn’t just me saying this – this is what the actual research says.  Gallup did a study on more than 195,000 employees, and when staff weren’t clear on what to do, employee engagement went down by 34%.  Just to be clear, that is a huge amount.  Disengaged employees had 17% lower productivity, 41% higher absenteeism, and 21% lower sales than companies with high employee engagement, so your staff not being clear has a huge flow on effect for the rest of your business, revenue and profit.

So how to we fix this?  We give our teams a clear, repeatable process to follow.  Step-by-step, and preferably with pictures.  It doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does have to be done.

In practical terms it looks like a checklist, with a picture for each step.  A checklist is simple, but a checklist is powerful.  Most people will scoff at this because it just seems too simplistic – and it doesn’t have any fancy words like “Digital Transformation!” “Blockchain!” or “AI!” (which is really just statistics and Machine Learning, but let’s not go there just yet).  Research from one Michigan hospital showed that when nurses and staff followed a simple checklist for inserting an intravenous line to a patient, deadly infections dropped from the highest in the region to nearly to zero, and saved the hospital more than $175 million as a result.

Checking In

Checking in is an important next step.  Why?  Because if we don’t check in – with our customers, with our team-mates, and with the other departments who receive our work – then we will rarely find out if they are getting what they wanted or not.  And if they’re not getting what they wanted then customers will leave, and work will be harder and take longer.

It’s far more common for people to just complain to their friends, instead of bringing up anything that isn’t right to a company or department who can improve and do something about it.  Research from the White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that 26 out of 27 customers will simply not complain, but will harbor bad feelings, foster low engagement, and leave.

Where Lean Management is involved, customers come in all shapes and forms.  You have customers who buy your product, sure.  But in Lean Management and for operational excellence we have internal customers too.  A core principle of Lean is “The next process as a customer”, meaning the person you deliver that information, report, schedule or other item to in your business is your customer too.  And it’s our job to deliver value to all our customers.

Checking in with your team at least once a week and focusing on their strengths, also increased employee engagement by up to 27%, bringing higher productivity, profit, and sales as a result.

So a “check-in” can look like a few things:

• A survey at the end of a customer experience
• A follow up phone call at the end of a customer experience
• A quality assurance check that a team-mate followed the process
• A catch up with a person in your team, to remove blockers and improve their strengths
• 360 degree feedback encouraged from your peers
• A “Retrospective” at the end of an Agile iteration in software development

The main thing with “checking in” is, it should be done as close in person, place and time to where an event happened.  That means you quality check an employee’s work as soon as they’ve finished that task, finished that phone call, completed that code, or finalized a sales interaction.  And we check a customer got what they wanted in a product or service very soon after they received it.

And how do we check?  You guessed it – against the Repeatable Process we put in place, so everybody knows what to do, what is expected, and can see immediately if it wasn’t done.  And if it doesn’t work, we improve it using the steps below, and put it back into the Repeatable Process.

Reduce the Steps

Again, this Lean Management technique takes the core of Lean practices and applies them in a way that seriously benefits white collar work.  We know Lean is based around reducing Waste, but traditional manufacturing Wastes don’t fit in a white collar world.

White collar waste is defined in the Lean CX Score as this:

1. Rework, or having to redo things
2. Waiting for others, for work, approvals, or even feedback
3. Excessive hand-offs (between people or departments)
4. Excessive steps in a process
5. Searching for things
6. Customers not getting what they want

“Reducing the steps” actually eliminates all of that waste in white collar work, making your Lean Management mission much, much easier.

There are a few key ways to reduce the steps, and the main ones that will work for you are:

1. Giving your customers the information they need before they have to ask (Visual Management), and;
2. Making it impossible to make a mistake (Error Proofing),

One way to use “Visual management” is to make the most requested information visible for your customers to see.  Or it could be how sales are tracking, the schedule for the week, how many calls are in a queue, or how many of each part has been ordered recently.

One professor at a university used visual management to reduce the time of white paper peer reviews (where others check over a white paper to ensure no errors are in place before approving them) from over two years to less than five weeks.  And he did it by making each paper visible on their main website page, showing where the peer review was up to and who it was waiting with.  It’s amazing what a little visual pressure can do.

Error proofing means finding ways to make it impossible for your staff to make a mistake.  Whether it’s using a check at the end of a process, or making things in the process more visible, or automating or pre-filling things to reduce errors, every little bit will help.

One car hire company used numbered keys aligned to a numbered board of hooks, so they could clearly see whether a particular car was home or away, or where it was supposed to be.

Use Lean Management In This Way, And Be Astounded At The Results

As we first mentioned, Lean Management and operational excellence is truly focused on improving Quality of the work, Delivery to our customers, and the Cost to our customers and our business.

By ensuring clarity, promoting feedback, and using that to reduce the steps to a customer getting what they want using the Lean Management techniques above, you will see a staggering improvement in all three.

I would love to hear about your journey towards operational excellence and true Lean Management.

Chat soon – David McLachlan