The Wonder Drug
A company called General Electric created a drug. The drug cuts costs, boosts morale and improves customer service. They called the drug “Work Out” because it helps organisations “take the work out” of the system.
Work Out is a simple problem-solving method. It gets groups of people together, gives them a problem to solve and asks them to find a solution. Then they implement that solution. There is nothing particularly clever about Work Out. It relies on five simple principles:
1. The people who do the work know the work
If you want to take work out of an organisation, you need to understand that. You need to understand it, see it, feel it, and touch it. You need to know the work. The only people who know the job are those who are embroiled in it every day. They are not the managers, the accountants or the process experts. The only people who understand the work are the workers.
If you want to remove the work from the shop floor, you must talk to the people on the shop floor.
2. Everybody should have two jobs
We all have one job: cleaning, cooking, filing, or answering the phone. That is pretty unambiguous. We also all have a second job, but not everybody realises that.
Our second job is to do our job better. If you believe that it is somebody else’s job to make things better, R&D, Operations Improvement or the Project Management and Change Team, you will always be disappointed.
3. Focus on what you can fix, not what you can’t
In his book “The Seven Habits”, Steven Covey introduced the idea of the circle of concern and circle of influence.
My circle of concern is large. Amongst other things, I am concerned about the melting ice caps, infant malaria deaths and the U.K. trade deficit. Unfortunately, I can be as worried about these things as I want; there is not much that I can do about them.
I also have a circle of influence. My circle of influence is smaller, but I have much more power over it. It includes the aerosols I buy, the money I give to Save the Children and the British bacon in my fridge.
Worrying about my circle of concern is pointless. I will spin my wheels forever complaining about the I.T. system or lack of training budget. It is self-defeating. My circle of influence, however, is different. The more I nurture it, the more it grows. The more I push it out, the closer it gets to my circle of concern. It expands. It is better to move some chairs and co-locate a team than do nothing. Who knows what I may be able to do once I have co-located that team?
4. Small stuff can make a big difference
On the whole, small stuff only makes a small difference. If you want the small stuff to make a big difference, you have to do lots of it. You must persevere. Giving up because it is “all a bit tactical” and won’t amount to a “whole hill of beans” is not the recipe for success.
Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance
Samuel Johnson
5. Managers should make decisions
As managers, we insulate ourselves from failure, and we avoid risk. We do this with copious questioning and analysis. Unfortunately, all this analysis takes up a lot of time. We second guess, seek another opinion and add another data point. If your organisation needs ten signatures on a piece of paper before making a decision, you won’t make it.
The problem with analysis is that it doesn’t and can’t tell us the whole picture. It is, by its nature, based on assumptions, and it will be wrong. The only way to learn what will happen is to try things. Test them out. It is wise to reduce risk, but there is also a risk that by not deciding, we miss the opportunity. Decide on the proposal, yes or no and then try it, don’t analyse and debate.
Try the Drug
Work Out is facilitated problem-solving. Why not give it a go?
Set up
Get a group of staff members together, 6 to 10 should do it, but it is possible with more or less. Ideally, this group should contain staff members from across several functional areas. Different perspectives will make the debate richer.
Finding the problems
Get them to agree on what they come to work to do, their purpose, and their raison d’être. Write it up on a flip chart.
Ask them to list out on post-it notes all the things they do every day. Everything they do; report writing, spreadsheet manipulation, phone calls, trips to the photocopier, list the whole nine yards. Then ask the group to split these post-it notes into two categories, activities that contribute to their purpose and activities that get in the way. Put the two sets of post-it notes up on a wall and force the debate, “does this task contribute to our purpose or not?”. When everybody agrees on the post-it notes that show what gets in the way, then you have flushed out the problems.
Next, prioritise these problems. Create a group of issues that the team can tackle. They need to be things that are in their control, things that they can fix or things that their manager has the power to approve.
Fixing the issue
Decide what should be done:
- Clarify what the issue is. Get to the heart of the matter.
- Explain why it is causing pain and show how much it costs the organisation.
- Show how employees can fix it. Identify the help and support that they will need.
Get the team to present the problem and solution back to their manager or director. Chose the person who can agree or disagree with the proposal. Get that manager to decide there and then. A “No” is fine, provided there is an explanation, but procrastination will kill the momentum.
Finally, make it happen. There is nothing like a bit of robust project management.
If you do this, you will find a million and one things that you never knew happened. They will all be wasteful, and your employees’ eyes will light up at the thought of doing something about them.
Why it Works
Work Out works for four reasons.
- Managers get closer to the action. As organisations grow, managers become further and further removed from the work. Consequently, they don’t see what is going on, and they don’t see the opportunities. The decision-making process inherent in Work Out brings managers back to the ground. They see the issues.
- Staff break down functional barriers. As organisations grow, they form specialised departments. They worry about their bit of the action and don’t see the whole picture. Work Out removes these barriers by bringing people into a room to resolve common problems.
- Managers remove the improvement bottleneck. In most organisations, a specialist function carries out all the improvements. That function becomes the rate-limiting step. If you empower people to change their work, more gets done.
- Employees engage. Wouldn’t you be more engaged if your boss allowed you to improve your work and not just deal with it?
Side Effects
The problem with Work Out is that, like many drugs, it has a nasty side effect; management resistance. Managers fall into two camps, those who embrace the process and those who loathe it. The latter group will do anything they can to stop it from happening.
- They will claim they have exhausted all the quick wins
- They will say it is a waste of time working on the small stuff
- They will be sorry, but they can’t afford to release the staff
Why do they hate it? Because it is threatening. If you have always worked in a hierarchical organisation where managers know best, it is hard to have “underlings” point out what doesn’t work. This is particularly true if you, the manager, were the person who instigated the rule that caused the problems. Worse still, the Work Out team may well be airing your dirty laundry in front of your boss.
If you want work Out to work for you, you need to overcome this resistance. The alternative is to stick with the status quo and not create the change. That is a safer but far less productive place to be.
Homework
Schedule four hours with your team, try running a Work Out session and see what comes up. You may hate it, but you will never know if you don’t try.
Related posts:
- Ignorance and the hippo: Why Italian aid workers failed in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- An extraordinary system: The logistics system built by the illiterate.
- A management fable: The story of Frank and the spanner.
More information:
- I pencil: Leanord E read’s essay from the 1950s explains why you should “Leave all creative energies uninhibited.” and listen to your workforce.
- Audio-tech business book summaries: A pdf summary of the original GE Work-Out book.
Further reading:
David Ulrich explains how “Work-Out” was developed in G.E. and provides a detailed how-to manual for those who want to implement the approach in their own business.
Post Script
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