Making Improvement Work from Home
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to do the majority of our work where possible from home. Causing us all to operate our daily lives differently. For many organisations the focus will be on business continuity during these times, for high performing organisations they’ll be looking at it through a different lens. A lens of how we can thrive in this instability and safe guard the future of employees and continue to wow our customers.
We advocate for a way of working to make improvement work, literally to make a difference and make the change stick and figuratively to make improvement part of everyone’s day to day work. Our system we call Cadence can be adopted in any work environment, on site, in an office, in a factory or in your living room. It’s a system built on the principles that high performing organisations use, principles that are even more important during these times.
How do you adopt this system and make improvement work whilst at home?
Create Laser Like Focus - Teams need to be united around a common goal, with clear measures and accountabilities. Even more important whilst working from home with little supervision. The team members also need to create a distraction free workplace to allow them to fully focus. This can be difficult with partners and children at home. So build flexibility into your day but block out key blocks of time and block out your kids and your partners during those times.
Build vivid transparency
The more you see of the good the bad the ugly the greater support that you can give. Use platforms like Trello where you can share your workload (To Do) what your working on (Doing) and what’s been done (Done!). Build in daily reviews where you look at what’s working so you can all adopt the winning moves. Look at where you could make improvements beyond what you achieved. Drill down into any blockers or interference and put in actions to remove them.
Adopt titanium discipline
Put the right routines in place so you get the right interactions with the right people at the right time. This is trickier whilst working from home however having a disciplined daily standup to review the last 24hrs, the present day and the day ahead, will create the focus, build the connection and the collaboration needed to seize opportunities or face real problems. In a world of uncertainty, routines are key to garner a greater sense of control. The discipline also feeds into that sense of self- control and leadership. We often hear that discipline is always seen as restrictive, we actually have found the opposite. We have experienced with our clients and ourselves that discipline actually frees you up to do more. During this crisis, we will have to learn to thrive in a new way as survival itself will be a struggle. Both will require innovation. Creating discipline will free people up to be more creative and spark the innovation required.
Foster Steadfast ownership
This is a leadership challenge however a system of focus, transparency and discipline will bring about better ownership. However getting results depends on great decisions being executed well. To execute you have to have ownership, ownership that is built on an internal commitment to the pursuit of individual and organisation goals. Team member’s commitment is built through the realisation that it’s their problem to face or opportunity to seize. They have to feel compelled to contribute. This is built with effective engagement on the real work. It’s a leadership challenge. Effective leaders spend time on the engagement piece, building awareness of the problem or opportunity. Through this awareness and attention to the real work, commitment is built. Ownership is created. Working from home you will have a reduced ability to have these types of conversations which means once you do have an interaction with a team member, use that interaction to exercise leadership, make it count, build awareness and commitment. Hold them to account.
Use Candid Feedback
To make improvement work you have to connect people to the problems and opportunities. You have to collaborate and use the rich diversity of people’s thinking to explore better ways of doing things. Together you can get on the front foot and co-create effective solutions and improve the way you do things. All of which requires richer conversations where you can explore each others thinking, where you can share your different realities in order to expand your world views. Conversations that challenge your own and others thinking. Conversations that make it explicit between what you want and what you currently see. Conversations that influence each other. Working from home, conversations shouldn’t stop however you do lose out on a lot of visual cues. You will need to listen actively, as well as listen to that small voice in your head. You will have to check understanding and use genuine open questions to draw out their thinking. When you share your opinion it should be clear and concise and supported with good rationale.
Focus on data centricity
It’s critical to always be working on what the real issues are, otherwise its a waste of effort and resource. To find the real work you need to look deeper than the symptoms of problems and delve into the root cause. You need to start to see the patterns and deal directly with those as opposed to putting a sticky plaster over a recurring symptom. Using data is key here to help explore what the root cause is, to help validate experiments or even that gut feel you may have. F.O.G: Facts, Opinions, Guesses - Never work of a guess, if you’ve got an opinion this must be supported by good reasoning. It’s highly likely that if you have good reasoning to form an opinion not just a guess, you will have data. Data that can then be discussed and objectively reviewed. These will then become facts shared by everyone. You can work with Facts, nothing else. Working from home doesn’t change this concept, what you may find is that as you have several degrees of separation from where the problem may be recurring you may find it difficult to get hold of the data and /or get others to see and understand it.
Evoke Radical Learnings
Improving the organisation never happens in isolation. It’s an evolution of many different factors. All improvements stem from a deeper understanding of the customer, the process, the product/service, the people, the equipment or the business itself. Creating learning opportunities accelerates this understanding, deepens learning and thus will increase the improvements being implemented. Having a system of reviewing planned vs actual triggers this learning process. Exploring the real work and applying experiments cements the learning process. This then comes habitual where every interaction becomes a learning opportunity creating the next breakthroughs in performance. Working from home, with limited work distractions ( although mindful you may have more home distractions like kids and dogs) you may find more time to reflect as well as more time to generally learn more about your profession, your customers and the work you do. A useful tip here is to always give yourself a routine reflection time daily with a longer weekly round up. Give yourself a 20minute learning slot daily, read an article, watch a TED talk, read those books you never finished or even started. Momentum is your friend, the more learning you do propels more learning.
Embed Rapid Improvements
Improvement doesn’t have to be a significant step change. Making improvement work and driving a culture of continuous requires marginal improvements made daily. Do what’s in your control. Play with it. Make experiments and learn from the results. Every experiment your deepening your understanding. During your daily standup if something didn’t go to plan, what can you do to get back on track , experiment and find out. If setting targets, work from what you know and increase it, you may not hit it, however that’s a learning opportunity which you can then adopt an experiment to improve. Embeding rapid improvements builds momentum. Momentum builds companies. Working from home you will have the luxury of trying out experiments to your own working environment and the way you uniquely work. Try things, experiment and if you get results share your best practices.
Execute Robust Control
Improvements produce a new standard. A new way of doing things. For businesses and ourselves personally to be effective we have to work to standards and continuously push them to evolve new standards. Robust controls are critical to ensure that your improvement actually does become a new standard not just a one off experiment by one person or team for a finite time. Make sure you use data to validate your improvement. Make sure you look at the whole value stream when assessing your improvement. What we often see is an improvement in one area has a benefit which is often neutralised elsewhere. Having an holistic lens on improvement will avoid you standardising something which may overall have a negative impact on the business despite it benefiting one area. Once you’ve validated make sure you make people aware of the improvement. Be patient and take your time for them to understand why it was put in place and the benefits it brings. Develop their understanding of the problem/opportunity. Build their commitment to facing that problem or seizing that opportunity. Once they are bought in explain how they can ensure the improvement is adopted. Walk them through what they need to differently. Support them with training material and standard operating procedures. Working from home is no different. You may not think you need a new standard however think back to the times you have managed to create an effective process performing a certain task only to return to that task weeks later and forgetting that super process you had before. Some improvements may only safe you minutes or even seconds, trying to remember something or getting things wrong and doing rework time and time again is usually a bigger impact than the act of writing down your process so you have for next time. There’s always a trade off between the time it takes to produce robust controls and the time it may safe you. A good way to look at trade offs is to look at the life cycle ( number of times you/others need to run this task over the total time frame this task is needed) and multiply that by the improvement benefit per individual task. You can then subtract the time it would take to set up controls.
Cadence
We call it Cadence as we like to refer to the frequency of the learning and improvement this system brings. "Cadence" in sport, is often the best way to be faster whilst conserving your energy in order to be responsive when needed. A key attribute into todays fast paced, complex world. This way of working will help you build a culture of continuous improvement whether you are working from home or not. During this crisis we all have to do something different, we have to adapt. Whilst we don’t have all the answers yet, what we do know is that you need a system that unites your team, that helps them explore better ways of working and fundamentally puts your team on the front foot to go and attack the opportunities around them.
It’s a choice, we either stand up and lead our way through this, or we lie down and let it beat us.
Image: Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
We would love to share more with you and help you implement a way of working that will help you make improvement work so you can build an organisation that is better. faster. We are offering a free consultation, click on the link below:
