There are 4 key ways to achieve manufacturing success says guest blogger Dig Woodvine, MD at XCL International, and they’re rooted in combining people and process effectively…
Before the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers were connected with their products and customers. They saw the customers delight as their handcrafted product clearly met expectations. They were close to their work and there was passion about what they did.
During the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers embarked on removing people from the process in pursuit of Operational Excellence. Production quotas were set with associated pay systems whilst middle management, who was seen as better educated, took responsibility and separated decision making from the work. The result was a disempowered workforce that lost its passion.
This command and control legacy created a gap between people and process that can still be seen in many manufacturing companies around the world today. There are four fundamental elements that manufacturers can focus on including Leadership, Engagement, Alignment and Performance to bridge this gap, otherwise known as ‘the LEAP gap’.
1. Leadership: The difference between how people are being led and how they need to lead
Leadership that is ‘tell’ and authoritarian creates adult-child relationships. It creates a high dependent workforce that responds by not taking responsibility and feels disempowered to contribute their ideas.
Leadership needs to be facilitative and distributed throughout the whole organisation.
2. Engagement: The difference between what gets heard and what is understood
Strategic briefings often tell a workforce the ‘what’ part of the strategy but not the ‘why’. The workforce is then left to make sense of what the strategy means to them, which usually occurs after the briefing, at the coffee machine for example. This consequently creates multiple realities of what the strategy is, which can lead to sub-cultures. When people aren’t told ‘why’ they need to do something it does not appeal to the emotional part of the brain where decisions are made, leaving people uncompelled to move to action.
People need to understand the “what” and the “why” of the strategy before they can engage with its execution.
3. Alignment: The difference between what you want people to do and what they actually do.
People need to understand how they contribute to the overall strategy on a day-to-day basis. Often middle management decides the activities that are required and brief the workforce based on the assumption that the people in the workforce will not have the answers. If people don’t understand what is being asked of them, decisions will then come back up the organisation and nobody will take responsibility.
Empower your teams to work out the “how” of what needs to be done.
4. Performance: The difference between what people achieve and how they achieve it
Where the workforce is given KPI’s in a culture created by middle management, targets are often not met so more controls are implemented, driving the wrong behaviour. Encouraging people to not work collaboratively can result in performance management procedures being implemented to manage the consequences.
Support, coach and reward the behaviours that your strategy needs.
And so it’s imperative that the longstanding culture formed out of the Industrial Revolution becomes more humanistic as Operational Excellence relies on the people in the organisation embracing the changes required of them.
XCL International has developed specialist methodology to help manufacturers achieve operational excellence through workforce engagement and empowerment.
You can connect with Dig here.
The post 4 ‘people-driven’ ways to achieve success in manufacturing appeared first on Clock Creative.
