In past blogs, we've talked about the cost of failure, and the time, money, and reputation loss involved. I had a conversation with a friend of mine who has implemented Lean into his manufacturing process and in talking to him, I realized that Lean addresses the cost of failure directly, and gives you tools to do something about it.
Learning about Lean has taught me the thought process behind creating efficient processes. I decided to interview Jon from Air Oasis and his former production manager, Connie Skeie, to give me some insight into how they implemented the process.
In this first blog of this series, they’re going to start with the culture change and how they implemented that. Many of the concepts Connie talks about are linked to Air Oasis YouTube videos that show what it looks like.
Jon
Once you learn the Lean process and see it in action, you can’t help but start applying it to every area of your life. When you stop and think about what you’re doing, before you do it, you save time and energy. It seems like a simple concept but actually trying to apply it left me overwhelmed.
I knew Lean would save money and time, so I was motivated to implement it, but I didn’t how to get started with a culture change that intense, and we kept hitting a brick wall because we didn’t fully understand the process. Because of that, we weren’t seeing any results and everything just reverted back to what we were familiar with.
Before Lean, I wasn’t really a business owner, I was a firefighter. When I came into work each day, I was busy putting out fires and when I went home at the end of the day, I would realize that I hadn’t accomplished anything aside from averting disaster. It left me working in the business instead of working on the business.
You can’t grow and improve if you’re constantly fixing things. I wanted to take my time back because I needed to be able to focus, so I hired Connie to be my production manager and take on the process of making sure everything was running efficiently.
When I was hired, I had come from a company that was already a Lean manufacturer, so that was what I knew. The company had trained us with the book 2 Second Lean, and we taught the concepts to our own teams throughout the company and built a Lean culture from the ground up. Through that process I learned that I really enjoyed teaching Lean to other people.
Arriving at Air Oasis on my first day, I could see that they were operating as two separate companies. The front office was neat, tidy, and efficient, but when I crossed into production, it was chaotic. The energy was frantic and everyone was very tense.
Because of that, I knew the first step would be to create stability. It’s hard to work in chaos and we wouldn’t have been able to implement any changes effectively, cultural or procedural, until we addressed that. So we made sure that everything had its own place, and everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing at any given time.
Once the environment was less chaotic, our second step was to start teaching everyone in production how to identify waste—which turned out to be pretty simple because once you see that process, you can’t unsee it.
Initially, finding waste was easy because it was everywhere. It was impossible NOT to see it. As we made improvements it became harder and harder to identify waste, and that’s when we had to become even better at finding it.
Our next step in creating a Lean culture was to implement a morning meeting. It’s not long, just fifteen minutes at the beginning of the day, but it’s the secret of our success. In fact, I would say that bringing people together every day to get on the same page is the secret to culture change, period.
My experience has been that managers and CEOs want a Lean expert to come in and change their company, but the truth is that if you don’t have buy-in from the top, and if you don’t thoroughly teach the concepts to your team members to change the culture, it won’t work. I was fortunate in that Jon gave me free rein to reorganize everything.
In addition to helping solidify Lean culture, the morning meetings also helped our company become more cohesive. The office people and the production people had been working in completely different spheres, and even had different work hours. Some of them hadn’t even met each other before.
Now that they meet together every day, everyone knows what’s going on everywhere. If the production specialists know what the customers are saying about the product, it helps them make improvements, and if the customer service specialists know about the production process, it helps them assist customers.
We have a different team member lead our meeting each morning, and in that, they’re required to present a 2-second improvement. It doesn’t have to be anything huge, just something that improves a process. Because of that, people are constantly looking at processes and thinking, “What could make this better?”
In order to do that, we had to really focus on critical thinking and problem solving. There won’t always be one right answer to any given problem and knowing how to think through a solution is vital. The other component is giving your team members the authority to make adjustments when they find a solution to a problem. You have to trust your employees.
Jon
We have a process for that, too. If you see room for an improvement you ask yourself three questions:
1. Does this solution pose a safety issue?
2. Does this solution improve quality?
3. Does this solution save time?
If there’s no safety issue, and it improves quality and saves time, you’re clear to implement your solution without having to take the time to go to your supervisor for approval. When you give team members ownership over the process you’ll be amazed at what they can do.
Our morning meetings produce so many good ideas. The team member who leads the meeting that day chooses an intro song, a short educational video, and a 2-second improvement. This prompts them to diligently look for improvements so they’ll have something to share in the meeting.
Sometimes the 2-second improvement is about fixing a failure. Sometimes the 2-second improvement is layered over someone else's 2-second improvement. We had one team member who presented a part that we use and demonstrated how they had to pull off four pieces of tape to access the inside to install the control panel.
They then showed that if you pulled off the tape in a certain way, you could pull off all four pieces at once. Later, another team member improved upon that when they discovered if you pulled the tape from the opposite direction, the pieces came off even faster.
One idea leads to another, which leads to another. That’s how things get better and better. No one is shamed for not getting it right the first time, our culture of teamwork that we’ve built means that we celebrate one another’s successes and support one another through failure.
Connie
The beauty of having the whole company participate in these morning meetings is that there are people with many different skillsets and areas of expertise involved. Someone may present a 2-second improvement, and another team member with a different expertise will see a way to make it even better, that the original person would never have seen. It’s about collaboration and teamwork.
Of course changing a culture from the ground up isn’t smooth sailing from the very beginning. Most people don’t enjoy change but to embrace Lean, you have to change.
I knew going in that statistically, when you introduce something new, there will be about 10% of people who are excited about it and all-in from the very beginning. Then there are about 10% who hate it. Everyone else is somewhere in between, so in the beginning you have to lean on that excited 10% to help you get the ball rolling.
Again, Lean is about respect. Teamwork is about respect. Culture change is about respect. So for those who were adamantly against the change, I respected them and their viewpoint. I wasn’t there to come in and force them to change.
One team member was very opposed to the new way of doing things and would sit at their desk as things changed around them, and didn’t participate at all. Since they weren’t actively opposing the process, I respected their position.
The thing is, when you change a culture, the people who really don’t fit will weed themselves out. As long as someone isn’t actively fighting against you, just let them come around at their own pace. Let them see that this is actually going to stick, and once they see things getting better, easier, and less chaotic, they’ll usually come around.
In fact here at Air Oasis, the person who was the most opposed to the change in the beginning ended up being the one who came up with the most amazing money-saving improvements that had a major impact on the company.
That’s what happens when you give someone time and space and respect. If I hadn’t done that, we would have missed out on all of their great ideas.
Lloyd
My takeaway from this interview was that there are seven primary steps to healthy culture change when implementing Lean:
Create stability
Teach team members how to identify waste
Implement a morning meeting to get everyone on the same page
Incentivize process improvements
Teach team members critical thinking
Empower team members to make improvements
Respect one another.
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