I had a few experiences this week that really got me thinking about what was underlying the behaviors I was seeing. There has been an expansion of sorts in one of the plants we are helping to improve culture utilizing things like Huddles, Gemba Walks, and Reflections. The concept of a huddle or morning meeting helps to bring teams together, open dialogues, allows for open discussion of performance and issues, and enables trust to be built. The plant has been seeing these things work for one unit in the plant and have decided to make huddles the new reality at all units. I have two contrasting stories of two different units in the same plant where these huddles have started.
The frustration we experienced at one unit was glaringly obvious in the faces and expressions of the employees. As we all stood there together, each sentence spoken was scrutinized and judged. The silence can be deafening, but looking at the faces, people were screaming with frustration. As days went on with little dialogue, finally someone spoke up. “You keep saying we have to do this and that, but you need to realize that we aren’t machines!” That was the frustration in verbal form. In that moment, and as the huddles continued during the week, we saw many more of these moments of frustration. A suggestion was brought up that when a part of the operation experiences a problem, we could go over and help the person with that problem. “You keep telling us to help each other, but you all [management] never help each other! Why would we do that when you are just going to tell me what to do?” As we worked with the managers we talked about how we need to really listen and what that actually means. So we ask ourselves, “what are we hearing from our employees?” At first we had the defensive part, that the employees aren’t working hard and should just do things better. But what about how we interact with our employees, what is it that they are saying that we create? This lead into a fairly short but poignant response. “They might not trust us.”
The second unit during this same shift was about as polar opposite as it could be. This unit started the huddle with a “Good Morning!” and instead of grumbles, the response was a “Good Morning!” back. The supervisor opened things up for discussion right away talking about safety, in this case if a potential haz-mat type object shows up unexpectedly. The supervisor opened up for a dialogue asking “what should you do if you find that?” and “what have we seen here before?” The next question really started getting responses, and for the rest of the week it just kept going. “What are some things we can do to help improve what we do as a team here?” This question is actually doing a lot of things although we probably weren’t aware. See the word usage – we, team, improve, we can do. The team started freely giving some ideas, and sharing with each other how they can make each other’s job easier. One of the team members ran over to get one of the containers we use for our product and demonstrated how to load the machine properly. One way the container is easy to remove from the machine, but the opposite way, due to the placement of the swiveling casters, and it becomes very difficult to maneuver. After seeing this we stepped back and asked “why was that so different?”
In our own thoughts we thought, this is what trust must look like in action. Doing some further reading I found this great article from planet-lean.org (http://planet-lean.com/build-trust-and-enjoyable-work-to-get-employee-engagement). Here’s an excerpt that I think might be relate to what might be behind what we were seeing.
“This means, at first, developing the employees’ confidence in their ability to do the job well, then their confidence in the fact that - no matter what difficulties they encounter - they will be treated fairly by their supervisor (and the company at large), and finally their confidence in the competence of their executive officers and in the fact that they care.”
What we started to notice is all the small interactions throughout the day that we have in these two units. In the one where the team was frustrated, we found that we (as the general management team) discussed a lot of performance problems they were having. Constant issues on performance without trying to work with them to identify and address those issues can lead to destroying and not building confidence. We find that a lot of these short interactions actually build into a lot of the frustration that we see. For instance, when we go into one section of the unit and see employees waiting, instead of engaging with them, we assume they are just not working and so we move them to another part of the unit to get to work. This one in particular came out with a comment at one of the huddles “we are working really hard but you just don’t see it!” What we have been doing in the frustrated unit was sow the seeds of distrust almost constantly, without ever being aware we were doing it. The opposite was happening in the engaged unit. Each day as a team, they helped each other, the supervisor tried to talk to each person to see how she could help them, and generally she had many of these short positive, trust building interactions with her team each day. Again, we are generally unaware that we are doing these things, but these are the things that are actually happening. The frustrated unit had a disbelief that management was there to support them.
So then, what do we do to build trust where we have, for so long, made it a part of how we manage to destroy trust. We must make a conscious effort to change that reality. We have been coupling the huddles with Gemba Walks and Reflection. During the huddles we actively try to create the environment to listen to each other, but in an environment of mistrust, these can turn very quickly into a blame and complain affair. That’s alright though, we are releasing years of pent up frustration, this has to happen. In order for the kettle to stop steaming though, we must remove it from the heat. That requires insight into the process to really understand and learn what is happening, and then to reflect upon ourselves. The Gemba Walks allow us to take what we are listening to, and trying to get a deeper understanding of how that is in the operation. We do these walks as a team and then immediately after, we come together to reflect. During one of these reflections this week, we hit a pretty big breakthrough for ourselves. Looking at the process at the Gemba Walk we started to see all the downtime that the machines had that were creating lots of stop and go (uneven) processing. This led to inventory build ups, and eventually led to our employees working really hard to keep up when that inventory build-up was released. There it was. That was the translation of what our employees were telling us, and what was actually happening. All of the things we had been doing before were because we did not truly have a deep understanding of the process. This is just the first step to building trust. In ourselves we must first see how we might not fully understand something, so how could we show fairness to our employees if we aren’t fully aware of things?
Trust seems to be that underlying thing we fail to measure, and it probably more so than most things, drives our performance, either good or bad.