First of all, lean improvement begins with "employees' understanding and support". Let's ask two questions first: "Enterprises do lean production and IE improvement, the efficiency is improved, and the number of employees is reduced, but employees work harder, the turnover rate of employees is improved, and employees complain more. What do we do? ""Do lean production, that is, improve, don't you just want employees to work more and get less money? Isn't it a disguised layoff? Who wants to make improvements to make themselves work harder? Who wants to be promoted and who wants to be unemployed? "The above two problems are employee complaints heard by many enterprises in the process of implementing lean production. What causes employees to be so opposed to the implementation of lean production? In short, we should realize that this contradiction stems from the situation that employees are worried that lean improvement will affect their personal interests. This conflict stems from the conflict between employees' values and facts. Conflict is not an object to be overcome, but a kind of conversation. It's time for business managers to listen to the distress of employees. Most enterprises have conducted in-depth research on the technical level when implementing lean production, but in fact, it is impossible to solve practical problems only from the technical level. On the contrary, the deeper you understand lean, the more you realize that the importance of technology is relatively low, and the humanistic consciousness in lean consciousness is particularly important.
Nowadays, the price competition is more and more fierce, and all enterprises are keen to adopt lean production methods to reduce costs. Some enterprises even take measures to reduce labor costs first and hand over the workload of two people to 1 person. Although this practice has made profits in a short time, it is very inhuman, which directly leads to the loss of motivation of employees, the decline of work quality and a series of contradictions between labor and capital. There is a famous saying in the management field: "If you want to satisfy employees, you must first let employees understand". But it is also difficult to get the understanding of employees. Some managers use their power to force employees to do lean improvement, and they don't even persuade them, let alone make them understand. If employees don't do what they want, they are considered incompetent, or they are simply punished. No one has ever explained the reason and purpose of lean improvement to employees and answered their concerns. What are the consequences of this? Lean improvement activities often turn into a gust of wind. Drucker, a master of management, said: "60% of mismanagement comes from communication." Enterprises should form such a habit when implementing lean improvement. When they decide to do something and want to get employees' understanding, they must communicate face to face with employees until they are sure of their understanding. And if you work on the basis of employees' full understanding, you can get the support and support of employees.
Second, lean improvement should achieve a win-win situation for employees and enterprises. Now, let's look at a case: two years ago, the author did management consulting for a medical product manufacturing enterprise. The general manager of this enterprise is an "able person" who does everything himself. People are less than 40 years old and most of their hair is white. The general manager often complains that the ability of cadres and employees is too poor, and any improvement depends on him ... This phenomenon is very common in many enterprises. As a result, middle-level and grass-roots staff have not improved and innovated for a long time and will never be able to improve their professional skills. The top management thinks that the quality of subordinates is not high enough, so every improvement is done by themselves, but the middle and grass-roots employees are not enthusiastic and perfunctory. In this enterprise environment, lean improvement methods can not be really applied in enterprises. Just now, we mentioned the humanistic consciousness of lean improvement. Employees don't care about the effect of lean production (www.chinatpm.net) improvement, and all employees independently improve the corporate culture. To understand these three points, what is the purpose of lean improvement first? Is it to improve efficiency? Reduce costs? Compress the production cycle? Or increase profits? Is improving efficiency more concerned by business owners or employees? Are employees more concerned or the boss more concerned about improving profits? The answer is definitely not employees. If this activity becomes more concerned by employees, then the development of the situation is another brand-new situation. Let's share the case of a medical device factory just now: with the continuous increase of factory sales, the production capacity is seriously insufficient.
Lead to longer and longer delivery time, frequent quality accidents and frequent customer complaints. Because with the increase of orders, the overtime hours of employees are getting longer and longer. Finally, the employees simply slowed down their work. They know that they can't finish the work anyway, and the result of doing it quickly and slowly is to work overtime for a long time. The general manager who likes to do it himself has become busier, but the problem has not improved. Excuse me, if lean improvement is introduced in this state, will it be successful? From the perspective of lean technology, there is definitely no problem, because there are indeed a lot of six losses and seven wastes in production, but from the perspective of humanization, it is difficult to succeed, because employees have begun to resist improving efficiency. They believe that improving efficiency means sacrificing the personal interests of employees to meet the interests of the company. In this state, if managers want to successfully introduce lean improvement, the first thing to solve is the personal interests of employees. Later, this medical device factory began to change the performance appraisal mode of employees, adopting the "man-hour output value award" system, that is to say, the workshop teams with low man-hour input and high output will receive high bonuses, and adopt the flexible scheduling system, so employees can leave work early as long as they complete the specified output within one day. These measures make employees willing to improve production efficiency. Then, we decided to choose a production line to be a "mouse" for lean improvement. The management fully communicated with employees in advance and promised to share the improvement benefits with employees. For example, the hourly capacity of the original production line 100 PCs is improved to 120PCS, and employees who do 20 PCs more can get a bonus of 10 PCs. We only implement piecework wages in some processes with a large proportion of manual labor, which is easy to evaluate the standard production capacity. The introduction of these measures fully stimulated the enthusiasm of employees for improvement, and employees began to be willing to accept more production tasks. In 65,438+0 months, the production efficiency increased by more than 65,438+05%, but the defective rate decreased by 2%. The implementation of lean production in domestic enterprises is mostly not so smooth, which is not a problem of technology, tools and methods. There are two main reasons. One is the problem of supply chain, which mainly shows that suppliers can't deliver goods on time and with good quality. Second, the problem of internal execution, which comes from the distribution mechanism. At present, there is a classic saying in China that "the distribution mechanism is the first executive power". If the benefits are well distributed, the executive power of employees will be high, but if the benefits are not well distributed, the executive power of employees will be poor. In the process of implementing lean production, the internal "execution" resistance often far exceeds the external "supply chain" resistance. Employees like to do things that are rewarding and related to their own interests. Solving this problem first, and then promoting lean production in the whole factory, the success rate is very high. When enterprises carry out lean improvement, they should first consider the increase of employee income as the first priority improvement index. Because employees love wage indicators, they will love other indicators of the enterprise, so that they can have the same desire and finally realize the synchronous growth of employees and enterprises. The success of lean improvement of an enterprise depends on its employees. Whether employees actively participate in improvement or not, benefit sharing is one of the core elements, which is "primitive nuclear power" and cannot be ignored or underestimated.
Third, cultivate employees' habit of continuous improvement and maximize the effect of lean improvement: Mr. Taiichi Ono, the founder of Toyota production mode, said: "When continuous improvement has become a work habit of Toyota employees, it proves that Toyota-style production has been successful." So, how do world-class enterprises create this cultural atmosphere of continuous improvement and independent improvement? The top management of an enterprise formulates macro goals and major issues, and the formulation and implementation of specific plans are carried out by middle managers. Middle managers must take the initiative to declare major innovation projects every quarter, and the feasibility will be reviewed by the senior management. Hold a management innovation meeting every six months to report the progress of the project, evaluate the achievements of the stage and accept your corrections. A management improvement conference is held once a month, and the keynote speaker is mainly the grass-roots employees who have made improvements in various departments, giving grass-roots employees a stage to show and reward their improvement, so that employees can enjoy the beauty of lean improvement, labor and creation through publishing. Even some enterprises print the improvement cases of employees into exquisite "Lean Improvement Achievement Compilation" and distribute them to employees, or make the improvement cases of employees into billboards to show them, so that employees can enjoy a sense of accomplishment and honor. In the process of improvement and innovation, middle and senior managers of enterprises often know the problems in depth, collect improvement cases, personally train and educate employees, and constantly improve their professional quality, so that employees can make various improvements in this process under the inspiration of their own education and actual cases, and more improvement cases are constantly emerging. In this way, an environment of respecting people, knowledge and creation is created invisibly within the enterprise. Dr. Zhu Lan, a quality master, emphasized that "the biggest problem in American management is that people's wisdom has not been tapped". If we can sum up the last content of this article in one sentence, that is, in order to make lean improvement produce lasting results, we must do a good job in motivating employees in the organization, including goal motivation, training motivation, caring motivation, support motivation, honor motivation, material motivation and promotion motivation. Through encouragement, improve the "improvement ability" of all employees, so as to achieve the ideal state of independent improvement and continuous improvement. This idea is based on the belief that relying on a few elites to improve is not the ultimate goal. Therefore, we advocate the lean improvement of all-round attack. Lawrence Miller, the founder of corporate culture, said: Whoever has cultural advantages will have competitive advantages, benefit advantages and development advantages. The cultural connotation of lean improvement is "communication, encouragement, understanding, humanism and win-win".