Active
Listening – How to Improve Morale and Rapidly Improve Throughput
In today’s blog posting I
want to talk about a very powerful technique I refer to as Active Listening. This
posting is directed at companies where the workforce morale is not good and for
all of those companies who need a rapid improvement in throughput. I’ve been using this “technique” for the last
ten years and every time I do, rapid improvement in throughput has happened.
Many companies today praise
themselves for how well they “involve” their workforce in their improvement
efforts. In fact, if you go into many
companies you’ll probably see a wall of pictures that support the contention
that “our people are involved.” And
although I love seeing this “gallery of involvement photos,” many times they
are just photos. So the question
becomes, just how involved are the subject matter experts (SME’s) within your
company? This depends on what your
definition of involved really is and who you believe are your SME’s. Involvement in many companies is simply
participation on improvement teams. But
in my mind, simply participating on a team is not enough to generate
significant improvement. Why not? I think the best way to answer this question
is through a simple case study based upon a consulting engagement that I was fortunate
enough to lead.
This company was in the
Aviation MRO (i.e. Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) industry and was a
contractor to the Department of Defense (DoD).
This company, by contract, was required to supply a pre-determined
number of aircraft every day and if they didn’t, they were assessed a
significant financial penalty based upon the number of aircraft that they
failed to deliver. This company was struggling
to meet demand and the results were getting worse. So much so, the corporate office replaced the
site leader in hopes of turning this company around. In addition to the financial losses for
missed aircraft availability, this company was paying a huge amount of money on
mandatory maintenance overtime in an attempt to “right the ship” so to speak. One of the consequences of this mandatory
overtime, which I might add had been in place for months prior to my arrival,
was extremely low workforce morale. The
more overtime the maintenance workforce was mandated to work, the lower the
morale became. Call-in’s and absenteeism
were high as well which were directly the result of this constant overtime.
Upon arriving to this site,
I met with the new site leader to discuss his issues and it was clear to me
that he was frustrated. And while the
out-going leader’s management style was command and control (i.e. do it my
way!!), the new leader believed in listening to fresh new ideas. I asked him if he was ready to involve his
people and he replied that they already did.
I asked him who his SME’s were and he gave me a list of technical people
(i.e. engineers, supervisors, etc.) on site.
I then responded with, “So these are the people that physically maintain
the aircraft?” His response was, “Well
no, but they are the experts.” I just
smiled back and said, “No they aren’t.”
I explained to him that the true SME’s are the people that maintain the
aircraft…..the mechanics, the avionic’s techs, the QA folks, the maintenance
control people, the flight-line workers and logistics workers. The look on his face was priceless….like he
had just had an epiphany of sorts. I
then explained my version of employee involvement…..Active Listening.
I told him that if he wanted
to rapidly turn-around his results, the first thing he needed to do was form a
team comprised of only SME’s.
This team needed to be made up of all of the maintenance related disciplines,
but that membership needed to be completely voluntary and wherever possible, it
needed to be the informal leaders of the workforce (I might add that this was a union
environment). I then explained the
central concept of Active Listening which is, the managers would not only
listen to the core team’s ideas, but as long as their solutions didn’t violate
any customer or company policies, they needed to be implemented exactly as
stated by this core team. I further
explained that this would be difficult, if not impossible, for some of his
managers and supervisors to do, but that it was absolutely necessary. The site leader’s response was very positive.
Several days later we had
our first core team meeting. We mapped
the maintenance process first to make certain that everyone understood exactly
how it was working. This was a valuable
learning experience for some of the team members because they got to see
firsthand how their work impacted the flow of aircraft through the maintenance
process. I then presented the basics of
the Theory of Constraints to this core team and, without exception, everyone
understood. As a team we identified the
system constraint to be all of the actions required to be completed (e.g.
approvals) before maintenance work could begin on the aircraft. I then gave them training on the Interference
Diagram (I’ve written about the ID on a past posting) and asked the group for
solutions to each of the interferences they had identified. There was skepticism that management would
implement their solutions, but the site leader assured them that their ideas
and solutions would be implemented exactly as presented. As this first meeting ended, we asked the
members to go solicit additional ideas from their co-workers.
To make a long story short,
the ideas came from everywhere and most of them were implemented exactly as
stated. The core team itself was
responsible for deciding which shop floor ideas would or would not be
implemented. You could see the workforce
morale changing…..improving and growing.
We met with this team twice a week and began a brief newsletter of sorts
to communicate the actions of the core team.
The results came swiftly and within 2-3 weeks, aircraft availability
targets were being consistently met. In 3-4 weeks, all mandatory overtime was
stopped. The workforce morale jettisoned
upward and availability targets were met at an even better rate…..all of this
because of Active Listening, the identification of the system constraint and
focusing our improvement efforts (the core team’s solutions) directly on it.
Bob Sproull
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