Define Your Organization's Habits to Increase Work Efficiency
We don't often think about the way we usually act at work, whether carrying out an informal five-step process to evaluate a new proposal or setting priorities for managing our time. But our ability to improve the way we work depends on defining and shaping our daily mental and practical habits – our “standardized work.”
Consider the experience of my colleague Lynn Kelley, who joined Union Pacific Railroad, the largest railroad network in the United States, with forty-six thousand employees, as vice president of continuous improvement about two years ago. When she arrived, she learned that a large proportion of employees would retire in the next decade. So the organization began documenting standard operating procedures to systematize the wisdom and knowledge of its employees. She told me: “At first, I thought standardized work would turn people into robots. However, we learned to use standardized work to engage employees in documenting and improving their work. Managers think they have to figure out what the best practice is and then implement it. But we decided that if we did that, we would lose employees' commitment. Instead, we implemented it first in work groups that want to be involved in developing their own standardized work.”
In the discussion that followed my post on balancing compliance and autonomy, I learned that there is great richness and breadth in the reasoning behind how organizations have defined standardized ways of doing things. But I noticed that the reasons fell into three broad categories: (1) to ensure that people follow “must-do” procedures (for example, safety checks), to achieve consistency, avoid safety or regulatory problems or deal with emergencies; (2) to make people aware of “fundamental” practices (a routine that has been judged the best way of doing things), to achieve adaptability, flexibility and even innovation; and (3) to make people aware of the criteria to adopt in “optional” choices (for example, compensating customers who were treated badly with up to R$ 50.00), to nurture creativity, innovation and the flexibility to meet customers' needs in real time and to increase employees' satisfaction with their work.
“Must-Do” Procedures. Avoidable failures continue to plague us in almost every sphere of organizational activity. In his book, The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, makes the case for a simple checklist as a way to avoid problems and deal with complexity, especially when human lives are at stake. Airplane pilots developed the checklist they use for takeoff and landing to ensure that planes don't crash because of avoidable errors. Gawande talks about the dramatic reductions in infections when a “central line” is put into patients while checking off steps such as washing hands and cleaning the patient's skin with antiseptic. Checklists help jog memory and clearly define the minimum steps needed in a process. As Gawande says: “Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided – and even enhanced – by procedure.” “Must-Do” procedures also require permission to dissent.
“Fundamental” Practices. How can we make the organization's work, the execution of its strategy and the fulfillment of its mission better? The disciplines that define how employees should do their work are well defined by certain process improvement methods I have discussed before, some very well known, others less so. To refine: when something is standardized, that standard becomes the basis for experiments that seek to improve the work. Employees identify problems with delivering what customers want, develop hypotheses about how the work can be improved to deliver the required level of quality, change one variable at a time and observe which ones make the work better. Adhering to the standard ensures that improvements will be sustained; it also makes training easier. “Fundamental” practices help employees with what they do in the zone between “must-do” procedures and “optional” choices. And one final key point: to make many small, rapid improvements to the work on an ongoing basis, people need to be highly committed to generating new ideas and running experiments.
“Optional” Choices. To build an organization's capabilities and increase people's overall commitment and motivation, leaders must give team members every opportunity to take the initiative and be creative. Your people want autonomy to master their work and fulfill the organization's purpose. Therefore, the organization must be explicit about where to encourage initiative. One obvious area, as described above, is asking people to look for ways to improve their work. Another example is handling incidents of customer dissatisfaction. For example, at Ritz Carlton, employees can spend up to a set limit to solve a customer's problem. Or, at Starbucks, employees follow an approach that encourages them to be flexible in their interactions with customers. As Kelley told me: “When customers need service in real time, employees who are empowered to be flexible within a certain standard can better meet those needs... because you can't anticipate every one – or write a script in advance! Putting decision-making closer to the people who deal with the customer is key.” The “Optional” Choice helps employees do what they probably should do, not what they are obliged to do.
We need to move away from the notion that standards necessarily mean rigidity. On the contrary, standardized work can help people do their jobs consistently and safely and improve how they do them. Instead of viewing their employees as mindless, uniformed “workers” (as Frederick Winslow Taylor did long ago) who need to be constantly supervised and forced to do the right thing, companies like Union Pacific are helping them do their jobs better by using a flexible view of standard operating procedures. The traditional view in which efficiency requires bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy prevents flexibility, must be replaced by a new model: the intelligent application of standardized work allows you to have efficiency and flexibility.
