Organizations often launch large process improvement initiatives with a “big bang.” Well-intentioned leaders bring in high-powered consultants to train a handful of staff to tackle the company’s biggest headaches.
Go big or go home, right? Who doesn’t want their organization to improve, as rapidly as possible. Let’s change the culture, and let’s do it NOW!
Although most of these large scale rollouts start off well, they sometimes fizzle out in staff frustration. After months of intensive Kaizens and Six Sigma projects, middle managers that have been pulled away from their regular jobs to “do process improvement” can’t keep up the pace. The short-term gains just aren’t sustainable.
Guadalupe Regional Medical Center (GRMC) in Seguin, Texas may have found the secret to doing process improvement the right way – with every team member and every team taking a small step, every day, toward making the organization a better place. There’s a daily rhythm of improvement at all levels of the organization, report consultants Jerry Berlanga and Brock Husby describe in the September issue of ISE Magazine.
How did this come about? A few years ago, GRMC leaders found that they were missing consistent follow through on key goals and action plans. They knew they needed to engage more staff in the process.
So, they implemented Lean Daily Management (LDM). LDM utilizes four parts:
- Leader Rounds – Each day, leaders visit key departments to learn what is happening, understand the challenges staff are facing, and to remove obstacles and roadblocks. The focus on ideas and actions that can be implemented today or this week.
- LDM Boards – Dashboards are prominently displayed in every department. They trigger visual management and regular problem-solving huddles (10-15 min.) each day. Leaders review the LDM boards with staff, pulling ideas that need to be escalated to the senior leader LDM board. Problems that may have festered for years are now exposed daily. Leaders act more as coaches, asking smart questions and pulling ideas from staff, rather than dictating solutions.
- Leader Daily Disciplines – These are the daily, weekly and monthly activities that senior leaders must do to keep the management model working (scheduling time for rounding, etc.)
- Lean Projects – These are pulled from staff LDM boards when issues can’t be quickly resolved.
At GRMC, senior leadership team members first began using LDM themselves. Then they rolled it out slowly, from one department to the next. As more teams became proficient at LDM, they identified a number of medium to large projects that could not be tackled in LDM daily huddles. To solve the issues, multidisciplinary and cross functional teams formed organically.
For example, one multidisciplinary team tackled improving the hospital’s diet order process. The team decreased the number of inaccuracies by 80 percent, and also increased efficiency and improved patient satisfaction and patient safety!
Want to learn more about LDM and how to make your workplace better? Check out the article here.
How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive workplace.
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