Time to Re-Engineer your Leadership

The Pre-COVID times may not come back in full. We may be in for a longer change in some of the ways we work in Companies. So, it is time to Re-Engineer your Leadership in your Company. You may have to modify your approach in some areas. Let us look at these areas.

01.  Upskill your Team members: Take a hard look at your Team, work out what Competencies are needed of each of them. Find ways and means to teach them these competencies on a continuous basis. Do not look at Training as one day in a month or One day in a Quarter. You need to use technologies like E-Learning and look at training larger populations of your team and on a continuous basis. You need to train your team members on those competencies that are needed on the ground to achieve their current year goals. Talking about implementing the learnings is not a productive one! Do not teach them anything that they do not need to use. The purpose of this Continuous training is to have as small a team as you can have and then empower them to work independently with little support from you. 

02.  Re-Engineer the Communication methods: If you are meeting in person when in the Company, you may be meeting with everyone wearing Face masks. To ensure a full communication while looking at the face and body language of the other person, it would be good to implement a Standard Operating procedure to meet virtually for most of the meetings even if everyone is in the office. You can think of creating some ‘Meeting Cubicles’ where the person can sit individually without mask. Keep the camera in such a distance that you can see the person’s whole body and not just the face. This will help you to see them fully and see their body language too. This is crucial for a good communication. You may also have cubicles that allow a meeting between 2 or 3 people with safety. When you have cubicles like this and a camera structure that will not allow participants to engage in multi-tasking, it avoids the ‘Absentee participants’. 

03.  Full Time teams for Improvement Projects: All the efforts for Blue Collar and White Collar productivity improvement should be fast forwarded. Whatever Capex that you have allotted for this purpose should be spent now! You may have to bring forward the next 5 years’ Capex ! You need big improvement in People Productivity NOW! You should set up Task forces for larger initiatives. Task forces work full time on the project.  Teams working part time may not work now. They would be too worried about routine not happening and if push comes to shove, the routine work always wins. 

04.  Address Blue collar labor problem NOW: If you have a large proportion of temporary labor and if you are facing serious problems about labor, this is the time to address this issue now in a permanent manner. You can do it in several ways.

a.     Go for automation and reduce dependence on large labor force.

b.     Go for Lean implementation and aim at doubling your Productivity.

c.     If you are setting up a new factory, go for a fully automated factory.

d.     If you are not able to invest, then go for better methods of attracting Blue collar labor into your company. 

e.     Set up a strong team to attract talent into your Blue-collar team. Your team needs to work harder now. No point in addressing this issue as you had been addressing for years. New approach is needed NOW!

05.  Go for Shop Video Analytics: You need to focus on the shop floor or the place work. Due to COVID reasons, if the focus is suffering, then you can make it up by taking Videos of the Shop floor activity and analysis of the videos. By closer analysis of the Videos from Shop floor, you can actually achieve more. You will have several options of running the videos slowly and you can get more from the Videos about your Manufacturing. You can also put Videos in inaccessible areas to observe the machine performance. Adapt this practice into your Shop floor improvement process. You can do it in following areas:

a.     Analysing the operator working more closely. Look at the Micro skills that they are supposed to use and how they are using.

b.     Use Video analytics for evaluating Safety. How many incidents are happening on the shop floor? Use Video analytics for this. 

c.     Use Video analytics for evaluating MTTR. The Mean time to repair can be evaluated with the help of a Helmet mounted camera video. 

This way using Video analytics, you can analyze the Shop floor happenings even more closely. You may be able to get even better insights from shop floor than earlier. This way you can make up for not being able to go to shop floor as frequently as you would have liked.

06.  Prioritise the Technology projects: Prioritise the Industry 4.0 related projects. Go for implementing the ‘Digital Twin’ Projects to monitor your critical machines online and ensure you move towards Zero Breakdown as part of your efforts to implement Predictive Maintenance. Go for monitoring the Process on the machines much closer with the help of Sensors to ensure you act on ‘Process Abnormalities’ much earlier and prevent Quality problems. By doing this, you would be going much further than what you used to in the ‘Pre-COVID’ situation. This methodologies can sustain irrespective of the Pandemic situation. Totally Re-Engineer the way you approach Quality and Maintenance. 

07.  Go deeper with data: Normally the Manufacturing companies do not depend on lot of data. The senior team would be taking decisions on the basis of their ‘gut’. Now is the time to implement a Data based decision making with the help of appropriate Software. The day-to-day decisions related to Production, Quality, Maintenance can be taken based on the data that Is coming from the IoT Projects that you would have implemented as discussed in 06 above. 

These are some ways in which you can respond. There can be many more. The best way to respond to the COVID created problems is to rediscover work methods based on technology that are much more effective than the earlier ones. Do not wait thinking you can switch to earlier way of working very soon. 

How are you attempting to Re-engineer your leadership?