Studies have shown that people with high stress levels perform 50% worse on cognitive tests than people with low stress.
Source: Brain Rules by John Medina
In today’s workplace where high stress is a norm, how much productivity are we loosing due to too much stress? How many hears off our lives are we taking when we have prolonged high stress? If you really have respect for you’re employees and people are you stressing them too much?
Often times in the business world we want to hit the home run. Heck at every company I worked at there were awards for hitting “home runs!” But what about all the base hits and sacrifice fly balls? I’m not trying to confuse the business world with baseball but the fact is companies reward big wins. The question is that how effective are all the small wins? Can it really add up to big profits at the end of the day?
The question about profit is a common question that I get when I talk to small and medium size businesses. They say “I’m too small for those type of changes to matter” and I tell them absolutely not. I work with a veterinary clinic which has 6 people on staff plus 1 doctor and they have seen tremendous improvements on their bottom line with just daily practices that are easy and simple to implement.
1) Marketing is a daily process – The receptionist have a daily call list to schedule appointments and remind patients of upcoming visits. Facebook is updated daily so they have a sense of community forming in their local area. They also reply back to emails and voice mails first thing in the morning. There are monthly or weekly calls to big clients like the city to maintain relationships.
2) Mistakes are reduced with standard work – Mistakes on the check in process were reduced over time and continue to reduce. They started at 4 hours a rework down to 3 hours, to 2.5, and currently the average amount of rework is down to 30 minutes over the course of 2 months. They are continuously training and implementing check sheets which seem slower at first but save time in the end and it actually trains them as they go.
3) Product sales are practiced and standardized – Depending on the pet that comes in the customer will be offered certain products available for sale. The information that is communicated to the client is practiced and tested for accuracy.
4) Customers are made aware of the location – In a veterinary clinic one of the factors a client will look for is the proximity of the clinic to his/her house. We will put a waver dressed in a dog or cat costume on Saturday’s to make people aware the clinic is open and available to serve their needs. The clinic is currently evaluating opening on Sunday to serve the clients better. Currently there are no clinics in the area that are open on the weekend.
5) Employees are in charge of making their work area better – Each person is in charge of making their work area better so they are constantly making daily improvements. One example was that bath times went from 1 hour per dog down to less than 25 minutes per dog.
The clinic was projected to grow at a rate of 10-12% based on the growth rate for the local market. The clinic is currently grown 23% and is tracking to grow 30-40% year over year with the same staff just with these simple changes already in place. These changes were all low cost or free and only take minimal time out of the day.
How do you improve daily?
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I recently had to call into GoDaddy.com technical support to resolve an issue. The issue is irrelevant but the experience I had with the techs was fantastic and something you don’t see from many companies.
I needed to call into customer service twice (due to my own issues not theirs) and both times I went through the same intro:
1) Domain name
2) Access code
3) Phone number in case we are disconnected
The techs seemed to be based in the US which is nice because they understand the local customers they are serving and the unique technical issues that might exist in the US and not in other locations.
I was able to describe the issue and in a matter of just minutes they diagnosed and addressed the issue without having to transfer me to a more advanced tech. They also explained to me in clear terms what the issue was and how to resolve the issue with minimal impact to my business.
So you want to “be Lean” but not really sure what that means? There are two parts to the “being Lean.”
1) The physical changes like line design (20%)
2) The culture of you company (80%)
I’ve talked at length about cultural importance and how to change your companies culture (previous articles about Lean culture). Every company that I’ve worked with always wants to tackle the physical changes associated with Lean. The first step with the line design process that I’ll take with a company is to make sure the product groupings are aligned by customer and customer needs.
In a manufacturing plant the products are usually grouped by model numbers. Model A is grouped differently than Model B but the only difference is that Model B has new parts. I worked with a computer manufacturer who would organize their products this way.
If you want to group products a little more intelligently than by much numbers then you have to do some comparisons. Here is an example chart of how we did the comparisons with the computer company:
Scientist Sam Glucksberg once conducted an experiment where he divided a collection of participants into two groups, assigning both groups the Candle Problem. He gave one of the groups a cash prize incentive if they solved the problem faster than the average person who took the test. Surprisingly, members of this group took three and a half minutes longer (on average) to complete the task
Source: Drive by Daniel Pink and Wikipedia
Modern management techniques tell us to motivate by the carrot and stick but the carrot and stick method doesn’t work unless it’s a simple task with a simple outcome. The more complex a task the less successful the carrot and stick method become. For more simple solutions and known outcomes the carrot and stick work great like routine left brain activity that can be easily outsourced or done by computer programs. Today’s problems are more complex and have unknown solutions. Rewards will narrow our focus and limit our possibilities and aren’t effective with today’s problems we see.
In a 21st Century work environment where cognitive ability is highly prized and intrinsic motivation works much better than extrinsic motivators under these circumstances. Daniel pink talks about his model of autonomy, mastery, and sense of purpose. Give people autonomy to do what they want and when they want (see ROWE), teach them how to master what they are doing and give them a “why you are doing it.” The combination of these three factors is encapsulated in a Lean approach of giving people autonomy to solve their own work environment, constant training to perfect skills of problem solving and strategic planning, and a teach “why” instead of saying “do it because I say so” approach. You can watch the highly recommend video by Daniel pink:
How do you motivate your employees? Do you motivate without money?
Related posts:
Motivating Employees Without Money – The Psychology Of Behavior Change
Motivating Employees Without Money
Hurry Up And Wait – Are You Motivating Your Employees Incorrectly?
Friday Factoid – What Motivates Employees
My Take Tuesday – (Not So Lean) Medical Practice
Thinking Thursday is a day to think about something besides lean, business improvement, six sigma, or the usual items discussed. Sometimes topics can relate to the business world and other times it’s just plain fun.
Today’s topic is about being lean but not about being “Lean.” It’s a topic that hits very close to home, your gut and health. Besides being a Lean propoment in business, I’m a nutrition coach at my local gym CrossFitCFT. I have to say growing up I was always the “big boned” kid who was picked on for being fat. My whole life until November of 2009 I was a vegetarian and initially that was because of religious reasons. My parents are Hindu and didn’t keep any meat in the house and they always packed my lunch so it was pretty simple not eating meat.
I got into martial arts and sports as a young teenager and slowly the pounds began to shed but I never had a strong physique. I ran cross country in high school and wrestled but endurance was all I had. Then came college. And over the course of 5 years (I cooped so it too me an extra year) I put on 60 lbs. of weight and was a very big 230. After college I decided I needed to get my act together and started eating better and exercising but still wasn’t loosing the weight.
In 2009 I was introduced to the Paleo Diet. The diet has four tenants:
1) Keep your body insulin sensitive by not giving it too much insulin in the first place. In other words watch the carbohydrate intake and no dairy because dairy protein will spike your insulin dramatically. Lower carbohydrate intake isn’t too much of a problem if you follow principle 2.
2) Prevent gut lining damage. There are several foods that can cause the intestinal walls in your stomach to be damaged. The worst of these is gluten but this also includes beans, legumes, peanuts, rice, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant.
3) Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio should be 1(omega-3):3(omega-6). If the ratio isn’t correct your body can become systemically inflamed and while I’m not going to go into the details but it has to do with too much production of arachidonic acid and other factors. The modern diet is approximately 1(omega-3):20/30(omega-6).
4) Acid-Alkaline balance. You want your body to be close to a Ph of 7(neutral) as possible. Meat, dairy, and grains are acid producing and vegetables and fruits are alkaline producing in the body.
So what actually makes us fat? It’s insulin regulation. Yes total caloric intake is a factor but not the primary factor and definitely not the only factor. Insulin is a hormone that tells your body to use or store the food you just ate. If you eat a meal like pasta and garlic bread you have a very high insulin response (and a very fast insulin response) so your body gets all this fuel that it doesn’t need and puts it in storage. Conversely since your insulin levels spiked up they will come crashing down making you hungry again in a few hours even if you had a 1000 calorie meal.
What to eat? Basically lean meats (grass fed/wild/free range), vegetables, fruits, and some nuts and good fats. Next time you’re at the supermarket try to only buy food from the outside of the store and not processed junk on the inside aisles. The more processed a food is the more it will spike your insulin.
Wiki Wednesday is where we have 1 topic and several thoughts on the topic from Lean practitioners.
“Is transparency always a good thing in business?”
Please leave your thoughts on the comments section. Here are some thoughts to get you started:
I would say that transparency is a good thing but only when it’s used to make corrections. With transparency come error being shown to the world and that can be a good thing. Only if they use the information else the information the transparency provides is almost useless.
For more wikiing please contribute to
http://leanway.wikidot.com/
Joe Dagger (@business901) was gracious enough to have me on as a guest on his podcast series talking about Lean Six Sigma in small and medium size businesses. You can find the pod cast at www.Business901.com
Have you ever worked a job and you were given little or no training, expected to perform at a high level, and when you make a mistake you are reprimanded. I’ve been on both sides of this situation and I can tell you that you that it will demoralize your employees very quickly. I my work with a veterinary clinic sometimes what’s missing is the basic blocking and tackling. I’m training the manager on how to be a Lean manager and we are currently working on standard work. One of the questions I had were what is the standard way to check in and check out a client. The manager had one response and the three other people at the reception desk has 3 other responses. This surprised manager but didn’t shock her. She knew that they made mistakes and the inconsistencies were not out of the blue. I asked how do you train the people. “They’ve all been here for over 4 months to over a year and should know the process by now.”
I challenged her to run through some dry run scenarios with the folks. During a slow time walk-through examples by pretending you are a client and see what they do and them correct them as you go. Initially she was she thought it was a waste of time but after the first walk-through she was absolutely shocked on all the errors and mistakes they were making.
At this point we then had the conversation about how the lack of training is de-motivating her staff and causing customer service issues. This is an easy fix of training a little bit at a time every day. It only takes 60 minutes at fist and as they learn and get faster the training session will be as short at 10 min a day. The important thing to remember is that you are always training.
As a result the manager went from spending 1.5 hours a day in rework for miss entered information in the computer to less than 30 minutes in just 1 week of training. The goal is to be down to zero by the end of the month.
Here are more articles that are related:
Motivate Employees Without Money
Hurry Up And Wait: Are You Motivating Your Employees Incorrectly?
Friday Factoid – Why Employees Leave A Company
40% [of companies] reported that downsizing did not result in reduced expenses and more than 60% did not experience higher profits after cutting staff
Source: Estok, D. (1996, June 3). The High Cost of ‘Dumbsizing.’ Maclean’s 109, 28-9
Why are companies so quick to pull the layoff card? My thoughts are that it’s because of the short term thinking of hitting the quarterly numbers.