Standard work is for everyone: even the CEO

Continuous Improvement starts and ends with standard work. It is much easier to improve a process when everyone works the same way. And the only way to maintain the gains of an improved process is to standardize it. This is fundamental for front line workers, but is often missing from the leadership of many "Lean" organizations. In order to improve how you lead or manage you have to standardize the processes you use to lead and manage. The CEO is not exempt. Here are a few ways that the folks in the C-suite can apply standard work.

Safety
The employee safety rate in healthcare (my industry) is abysmal. The injury rate is three times that of most manufacturing industries. Nurses and techs tend to focus on patient care and safety while ignoring their own personal safety. This is not an accident, it is a direct result of the way that most hospitals are led from the very top, and up there employee safety takes a back seat to patient safety and care.

Leading a safe organization starts with making safety a priotity. Do this by putting safety first, literally.

• Make it the first item on the agenda for leadership and operational meeting.
  
• Start every day by reviewing and following up on injuries from the previous day.
  
• Make your recordable injury rate the first item on you operational dashboard.
  

Insist that your directors and managers follow this example and put safety first in their daily meetings and interactions with frontline employees. Putting safety first at the very top creates a culture of safety. It is not the only thing need to improve safety, but without it nothing else matters.

Go to the Gemba
In Lean, gemba means "the place where the work is done." We talk about "going to the gemba" to see what is actually happening with our employees and customers. This is also called management by walking around. When the CEO or or VPs go to where the work is done and talk to front line employees amazing things happen. Trust starts to build. The leadership will understand what challenges are employees face in getting their work done in a way that they wouldn't otherwise.

This is something that makes sense to most leaders, but is still done much too infrequently. How can that change? make it part of standard work.

• Schedule part of every day to visit some area of the organization and talk with the employees.
  
• This should not be a formal meeting, just observe the work being done and talk with them about any challenges or frustrations they have. (And remind them to work safely.)
  
• Make this a part of your routine, and set the expectation that VPs, directors, and managers make it a part of their routine.

Metrics
If it is important, measure it everyday. Enterprise software makes it easy (or at least possible) to track financial metrics by the day, and most executives do this already. But financial metrics are often too far removed from the processes we manage to be a real guide. Identify what process have the most impact to meeting your goals, find a way to measure them, and track those metrics on at least a daily basis.

Every organization I've worked at has had at least some metrics that they looked at monthly, and caused hysteria when the numbers were out of line. By the time the metric is actually reported it was too late to investigate the problem, much less fix it. If a process is important enough to report monthly, then it is important enough to measure daily. This is how you make sure that you stay on top of those things that are important, not just urgent.

• Inventory: Have your supply chain manager or each department manager report inventory days on hand on a daily basis.
• Staffing: If you flex your staff based on demand, measure your staffing ratios on a daily basis and tweak your flexing process.
• Clinical results: Any clinical activities that have a standard process associated with them should be measured daily. examples include: medication nomograms, glycemic control, and time from lab order to result reported.

Standardize the process of getting these metrics so that you know that the right people are also looking at the numbers. The IT department shouldn't just write a report that for the CEO that does this automatically. The process owners need to be responsible for collecting this data and reporting it up.

Meetings
Meetings at most companies are a mess. There are too many of them getting too little done with too many of the wrong people attending them. Leadership can go a long way toward fixing this by setting some standards.

• Agendas: Every meeting needs an agenda. Short, simple, and in the body of the email (instead of an attachement) is best. Give your people the option of declining any meeting that doesn't have one.
• Time: Keep them to fifty minutes. By ending ten minutes before the hour folks can get to their next meeting on time. We should have learned this in high school. See if your IT folks can make this the default in your calendar software.
  
• Publish the decisions made and next actions the same day.

The further you get from actually serving the customer or making your product the easier it is to get distracted from what is really important in your organization. Use standard work to keep the important things first.

Photo: indexed