Employee Engagement & Lean Thinking

Source: Bourton Group

Welcome to another of our monthly publications as part of the Lean Champions and Practitioners Forum. 

Two recent publications from the CIPD have raised the profile of employee engagement and its impact on organisational performance.

With this in mind, we have asked Lesley Fleming to talk about the importance of creating an engaged workforce. Lesley is a senior consultant at Bourton Group, and specialises in the people aspect of change, focusing on developing leaders, teams and individuals to enable them to introduce and sustain business improvement methodologies, such as Lean.

The CIPD report ‘Creating an Engaged Workforce’ measured the impact of greater engagement in three key areas: performance, innovation and retention. They concluded there was a direct correlation between people’s level of engagement and their appraisal scores; their likelihood of searching out new methods, techniques and business transformation opportunities; and their intention to remain with their current employer.

These findings are reinforced by examples quoted in the 2013 Civil Service People Survey results for 2013: Marks and Spencer report a direct correlation between store profit and staff engagement levels; Aon Hewitt report the same in relation to sickness absence and incidence of employee stress; RSA Insurance reckon that eight engaged employees do the work of nine; and BAe Systems attribute a 25% reduction in the lead time to build Typhoon jets to greater levels of employee engagement.

However, despite these findings and greater optimism in the economy, we see that employers are still focusing primarily on short term results and operational efficiencies. There is little room in the HR budget for well intentioned but potentially nebulous engagement programmes. So, how can we all benefit from the enhanced performance that employee engagement clearly brings, without being distracted from maintaining service delivery and protecting the bottom line?

Lean thinkers will, of course, know the answer to this! The benefits to be gained from identifying process and service improvements; generating and implementing robust solutions; and achieving sustainable results through Leanare equally well known. Using Lean as the vehicle to raise employee engagement as well will clearly deliver rewards on both fronts, but is this possible without launching another ambitious corporate initiative, funding an expensive project office, and employing an army of specialist facilitators? Of course it is!

Getting going and reaping immediate benefits from both Lean and greater engagement is much easier than people think. The most straightforward and successful solution is to bring Lean thinking bang into the daily routine of workplace teams. Here is our simple checklist to go from ‘base to bunce’ in eight easy steps:

1. Lead a discussion with your team to explore and articulate their core purpose: who are our customers; what do they want; how do we help them?
2. Establish with the team how they know whether or not they are achieving this: what evidence do they use to know if they are doing a good job or not; how is it measured?
3. Provide the means for them to set up a simple visual display that communicates this to everyone involved
4. Set aside ten minutes every day for them to get together to focus on what’s important: what did we do yesterday; what do we need to do today; how are we going to go about it?
5. Encourage them to identify and log obstacles to progress: where did we fall short, what will we need to do to putting it right?
6. Provide a simple toolkit based on the three C’s (concern, cause, countermeasure) for them to fix their own problems: brainstorming, root cause analysis, ease / benefit matrix, action plan
7. Support them in making and sustaining changes to the way the they work, and ensure they capture benefits
8. Publicly recognise and promote the impact they are having on their results

All that is needed is a felt tip pen or two, a whiteboard, and a leader who is prepared to spend time working with their team in a slightly different way.

Best Wishes

Rob Walley