Finding Win-Win Situations

Published: April 12, 2019

How do we find win-win situations and what exactly are they? If your business is new to change management or any sort of process improvement, then these should be extremely easy to find. If you have already begun the transformation of becoming a Lean business, they will still exist and may just require a little more encouragement to find.
In my eyes, the definition of a win-win is this: anything that can be changed or improved that helps make the employees’ life easier and removes waste (removes cost) resulting in the business being more profitable.

Have you ever heard one of your employees say, “Man this is stupid, I don’t know why we do it this way”? And every day or every week, they continue to do this task in the exact same way. Fixing this is one of those win-win situations. How you handle changing it, however, dictates whether it remains a win-win or you drive that employee even further from caring about helping you succeed.

I found this out the hard way. To help you avoid this, let me tell my story.

A few years ago, after starting the Leadership Certificate at NAIT, I was on a mission to make some changes. We had just completely reorganized the warehouse to help decrease the amount of material handling and help overall material flow. Now it was time to move into the office. Cleaning, painting, reorganizing and a few upgrades. Even though in one of the shared offices we installed new desks and made a bunch of extra room, one of the occupants was extremely upset. This new layout got rid of a bunch of the issues that were constantly complained about. There is not enough room, my desk is falling apart, there is no room to do the paperwork. So why was this person so upset when we fixed a lot of the grievances that were identified?

The employee was not involved in the changes.

Yes, it is that simple. Hopefully, you are the type of manager or business owner that learns from the experience and not the type that is completely offended by the employee not being grateful for all your hard work.

There are many ways to involve your employees in the improvements that need to happen within your organization. We will look at a couple that will help them embrace plucking the low hanging fruit and reveal our win-win situations.

A standard go-to in most learning companies is the “Suggestions for Improvements” box. This, in its basic raw form, is all you should need to do to get people engaged in the process, right? Then why, in so many cases, does it work for a few months and then slowly die dust-covered in the corner of the lunchroom? The main reason for this is the feedback loop, or rather, the lack thereof. These can work, there is no doubt about it. The problem is that one person or maybe one group of people end up excited that they had input on making some changes while the rest of the staff is left feeling rejected. This is possible to overcome if the feedback loop is complete. Let’s say you have a staff headcount of 100 and you pick one improvement to do. In order to make sure that each loop is complete you will need to explain to 99 people why you are not going to act on their suggestions. It ends up being way too big of a drain on your resources. After all, you are trying to run a business. To make matters worse, you have some other dynamics at play.

Have you ever heard of Jack Welch’s 20-70-10 rule? It basically says that you have good, average, and poor performers which are representing 20%, 70% and 10% of your staff. Another way to look at this might be that 20% of your staff is on board and willing to do whatever is required to succeed, 70% are on the fence and 10% are trying to bring everyone down. Chances are good that the only entries you get are from the top 20% who are already on board with helping. If you do find a way to get some input from the 10%, and that input ends up being neglected, then you have essentially driven that employee even further away from where they ideally need to be to succeed. Keep in mind that for your business to succeed you need your employees to succeed as well.

AGAIN – this can and will work if you have the ability to make it a priority, and the resources to make sure that contributing employees do not feel that they are neglected.

Another way to involve employees in the improvement process is to use Nominal Group Technique. With a little bit of foreground work, this can be an easy tool to involve employees in reaching a consensus on improvement projects.

Filed under: LEAN Consulting, Uncategorized