Who suffers from a Bad Process?
A bad process design can break the morale of your employees. In many cases, a process was setup without the input of an expert in process design or process improvement.
With poorly designed processes in the company, you will notice things such as;
Who experiences the pain of a bad process?
In first place, I would say it is the individual employee that suffers from a badly designed process. When it takes long time to perform a basic task or complicated to know exactly how the job should be done, you can count on a lot of waste from under-utilised human potential and skills. Staff members stop giving their best because their morale has already got hit by the repeatedly painful process of doing their daily work, simply by experiencing the inefficient process from inside. Managers won't realise all of the pain their employees go though. Manager's receive a different kind of pain, perhaps through stress of faulty outputs, escalations, managing staff, exhausting decision-making from lack of standardisation, too many E-Mails / Meetings and of things that has to be fixed urgently.
Who defines Quality?
In Quality and Process Improvement, it is the customer who defines quality. It is the customer expectations, requirements and needs which keeps our business running. Shift more of your focus to:
Build upon the Ideas, Talent and Skills of the Employees
It is our job to continuously try to understand our customer's need and concerns. In Lean, respecting and listening to all staff members is a keystone.
Why is it critical to put employees first?
Employees knows the details of the processes, they receive the complaints from the customer and suffers the inefficiencies of the processes. So before you worry about Big Data, Business Intelligence or making more fancy graphs and Dashboards for management, consider the potential and value of each improvement idea that comes from staff itself. This is a human aspect and requires a baseline of humility and GEMBA (Go and See to understand in first person).
Is there a high level of stress and fire-fighting?
If you make it a habit of fire-fighting, you are not improving the processes. It is that simple. A scattered mind and stressed body, is not capable of reflecting upon improvement ideas in the present moment. To become strong in Continuous Improvement, we need to incorporate a daily habit of listening to improvement ideas. This itself will make it evident what could take our operations to the next level of performance. If you always stress from meeting to meeting or feel overwhelmed by emails, you probably don't even prepare well for the meetings you are going to and shoot of emails in a desperate fashion.
Free up your time. Stop sending so many emails and engage more with the team. The team will return you the goodwill. I promise. Try to build-in quality to each of your processes, allowing for the process itself to control the input quality and output performance. Think 2 Seconds Lean, Poka Yoke (mistake proofing) and Visual Management.
Do you still believe a stressed person is more productive?
Observe the productivity between your stressed state and when you are relaxed. Can you even compare the quality of the Output? It is okay to have a relaxed and pleasant workplace. If you focus on the process performance itself, you can stop worrying about petty things and people will stop pushing people around. Start today by making your workplace more pleasant and efficient. It doesn't matter at what organisational level you currently work, you always have influence over your tasks and the way you chose to work. You have more influence than you think. Don't ever stop sharing your improvement ideas, just avoid expecting all of them to be approved as that expectation will lead to disappointment.
A lot of Rework and Overprocessing?
Rework, Over-processing and Defects are all signs of poor process design. If one same item has to go back and forth before it can be completed or follows a tedious slow process, fix it! Consider performing a Lean Waste Walk and explore all the waste you can observe in the process and potential solutions will reveal themselves to you. This will increase productivity, efficiency and wellbeing for whomever is involved or affected by this process.
Gemba Walk Questions
In short, Fix What Bugs You!
Let me know if you think I can help. I offer a free introductory workshop to discuss your current needs and issues and share a glance at Process Improvement and Continuous Improvement best practices you may want to implement.