Commitment to Improvement – empowered workforce
At the end of the day, its people who make the change happen. Its people who define the change, its people who implement the change and its people who use the new processes resulting the change.
Your Improvement program will not be successful unless the workforce support, embrace and commit to the change.
That commitment can been in the ideas generated, the discussions in the progress reviews, the effort put into implementing the resulting initiatives and the commitment made to making the new processes work.
Assuming you have successfully communicated the need for change (see out other guides on this), you still need to ensure that people are empowered to make the changes needed including allocating sufficient time and effort to implementing those changes.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how to ensure sufficient time is allocated to making change happen both for:
- Initiative owners
- Business leaders
We’ll start this post by discussing the expectation of how much effort is actually put into improvement (vs simply maintaining the current operation).
Time allocated to change – what expectation do you have ?
In many organizations (probably most) there is no clear expectation of exactly how much time and effort people should make in improving the organization – other than vague expectations that its part of a senior leader’s role to make improvement happen and some people in the organization are actually expected to focus on improvement (its in their job title).
And, if you’re reading this, then you probably fit into one or both of these categories – you might be a Head of Improvement, Chief Transformation Officer or simply an improvement lead tasked with making improvement happen in your area.
And if you do find yourself in one of these categories (senior leader or have designated improvement role), then you’ll also be aware that you can’t actually implement a major Transformation or Improvement program across an organization on your own – no matter how much effort you personally put into this! You need the entire workforce to be committed to the change in order to deliver a successful improvement program.
Generally, the time allocated to improvement increases with level of management – more senior leaders are expected to spend more of their day/week on improving the business (with longer time horizon).
IMAGE
As leaders become more senior in the organisation – the onus is on them to spend more of their time improving the organisation and less time on operational issues. It’s a responsibility to your employees, and a privilege – that you improve working conditions, safety and performance and make the business stronger and more job secure.
As a front line leader, managing operational issues could occupy 80-90% of your time as you problem solve daily issues.
As you progress to higher levels – the time horizon you are operating on becomes longer. You become involved in planning cycles and longer-term issues such as market strategies and capital expenditure planning.
But whatever your level – either as a leader or working directly in the frontline – you should still attempt to improve your team’s operation and leave the business in a better condition than you started with.
In organizations steeped in Continuous Improvement programs, everyone is trained on how to identify waste and there is a high expectation that everyone contributes to improvement. For example, in Toyota, the Toyota Production System (TPS) expects improvement from everyone and specifically allocates work time from everyone to do this including on the production floor (as the person doing the work is often the best person to understand the issues and how to solve them).
Does this view resonate with your organization ? Is there an expectation that everyone is involved in improvement in some way ? More generally, review how much time is currently spent on improvement and share with Senior Leadership. What are the expectations in your organization and can these be changed ?
Empowering Initiative owners to make change
For your current improvement program, ensure sufficient initiative owner time is actively allocated to improvement. It’s unrealistic to expected an already fully tasked employee to suddenly take on the role of an initiative owner that requires 50% or more of their time.
Ideally, try to get a sense of how much time commitment is needed. The implementation plan should detail out the work steps, who is doing them and much time commitment is needed from reach person. This should give a good indication of whether its realistic for the initiative owner to do both their day job and implement the initiative. If it’s, say, 20% or less time allocation required, the initiative owner can probably juggle their tasks to manage both. But if its 30% or more something is likely to give (either the ‘day job’ or the new initiative) and if its 50% or more – then it’s clearly not realistic to do both without some assistance (these are rough rules of thumb!).
There are several ways of solving for this:
- Support the initiative owner with an additional resource for some of the tasks
- Backfill the initiative owner’s day job (e.g., for 3 months whilst the initiative is underway)
- Offload some of the initiative owner’s day job – can the some tasks be delegated to the rest of the team ?
- Break the initiative down into stages, starting with the highest value stage, and take longer to complete all the initiative overall but at least bring benefits forwards where possible
Also make sure that the chosen initiative owner is actually empowered to implement the initiatives. The initiative owner should be sufficiently close to the problem that they fully understand the opportunity to improve the situation (and also likely benefit from the change). They are also likely to be the person who actually suggested the idea originally.
However, the initiative owner also needs to have sufficient skills, capabilities and role to actually make the change happen. This might vary considerably by initiative depending on what is needed to implement each initiative – so its definitely case by case.
Business leaders
It’s important that a leader’s core routines allow sufficient time for improvement and sustaining improvement.
For any Improvement program (Continuous Improvement or Transformation) running business leader should be allocating time to:
- Improvement progress reviews – Leading (or participating in) progress reviews – likely weekly. For each review, there will also be some preparation needed to understand where to focus the review and what issues need resolving.
- Resourcing – Ensuring that initiative owners are able to implement their initiatives. As discussed in the earlier section – you need to ensure that initiative owners actually have sufficient time allocation to work on the initiative. For Continuous Improvement initiatives this is less of an issue given that these initiatives tend to be smaller in size and effort.
- Gate approvals – Business leaders will likely be the sponsor of all initiatives in their area; so they will need to stay on top of gate approvals and ensure initiative owners get appropriate feedback.
- Need for change/progress comms – For major Transformations, there will be on-going workforce comms initially talking through the need for change and creating their own change story and then in later stages giving progress updates.
Additionally, as a leader there are also many everyday improvement activities that are expected which can also be viewed as improving the business:
- Identifying waste opportunities: Going to the front line where the work is being performed to understand what is actually happening – and using this time to identify waste opportunities
- Problem solving sessions – Supporting and leading root cause problem solving on identified problems including providing coaching on approach and general problem solving
- Operational performance reviews – Ensuring the operational performance dialogues are constantly looking to improve performance (note this is in addition to the Improvement progress reviews)
- One-on-One coaching time – Ensuring your direct reports receive one-on-one coaching time and that you’re able to coach on areas needing development
- Process Confirmations – Completing structured process confirmation at the work front to check how processes are working (are they working as expected – and if not, then understanding why not and providing guidance)
Ideally, these activities are scheduled into leader’s calendar as routine activities (and not moved) so their time is locked in. Leaders need to ensure that there is sufficient time in their calendar for these improvement routines.
A useful tool for leaders to ensure they allocate their time efficiently according to priorities is the time management matrix:
IMAGE
The matrix is used to allocate tasks by urgency (horizontal axis) and importance (vertical axis).
- ‘Important but not urgent’ activities – such as the core improvement routines – should be scheduled wherever possible – so as to lock them into the calendar- and try not move them). Even whilst locking in time for these activities – also consider if they are being done the smartest way possible. Given that they are scheduled – they are also the ones that can be ‘engineered’ to be efficient.
The temptation is to defer these activities for some urgent tasks that need attention ‘right now’ – but try to resist this temptation especially if these urgent tasks are not really that important.
- ‘Important and urgent’ activities need to be actioned ‘now’. These are priority for the day – but could potentially be downsized to just the critical issues (rather than trying to solve the whole thing)
- ‘Not important but urgent’ activities should either be delegated or potentially declined altogether. These are the activities that you definitely do not want to swamp your ‘important but not urgent’ core routines. Just because they are urgent there is the temptation to give these activities more time and attention than they truly deserve. Also consider building up your team’s capabilities to handle some of these activities (assuming that they would be more important than their existing activities).
- ‘Not important and not urgent’ activities – These are easier to delete/decline and should be eliminated from your day’s task list. Be polite if needed!
Conclusion
This guide was a brief summary of how to enable your workforce (including both initiative owners and business leaders) to power your improvement program to success.
Hopefully, this will both make you question what exactly are the expectations in your organization at different levels on the expected commitment to improvement and also how you can best enable your workforce to make change – both for initiative owners or business leaders.