Paying Attention to the Psychological Drivers of Participation
More than 15 years ago in the wake of TQM’s (Total Quality Management) failure to take hold in U.S. organizations, the American Quality Foundation looked to answer a simple question: What motivates employees to participate in quality improvement efforts and what doesn’t?
The answer, derived from in-depth study and observation across organizations in North America, Europe and Japan, found that the motivational hooks for driving participation in quality improvement, especially for North American employees, had less to do with organizational outcomes and more to do with greater job satisfaction.
The American Quality Foundation Study concluded that efforts to indoctrinate employees on quality improvement theory and tools are not likely to yield results without greater attention to the psychological triggers for motivating behavior change.
Based on this finding it is not surprising that conventional Lean Six Sigma Deployments don’t trigger widespread enthusiasm by most employees (except those designated for full-time Belt status).
Unlike Black Belts (and to a lesser extent Green Belts) where satisfaction comes from mastering a powerful set of tools for solving complex problems, the majority of frontline employees, supervisors and even middle managers will never enjoy that reward from Lean Six Sigma.
In fact, one of Lean Six Sigma’s core strengths has actually impeded greater employee engagement. The requirement of going to school as a prerequisite to Lean Six Sigma participation is a barrier to engaging the majority of employees that don’t have the time or interest in becoming Belts.
Nonetheless, employees are storehouses of ideas for improving performance and are eager to tell what they know. The problem is that conventional Lean Six Sigma Deployments offer few, if any, practical ways to economically and reliably convert employee knowledge into effective action and sustainable results.
Evolution of the Rapid Action Process
Leap Technologies’ search for a better way to engage employees in continuous improvement started at the General Electric Company in the late 1980s with the Work-Out Process – a simple, but at the time, revolutionary approach for solving complex performance problems by bringing together large stakeholder groups to explore solutions and force decisions in very short time frames, typically three days or fewer.
Working with GE and a number of other large organizations looking for an alternative to traditional TQM methods for employee-driven improvements, Leap developed the Action Workout™ process, a fore-runner to the Rapid Action Team Process.
Action Workout combined the rapid action orientation of the GE Work-Out with a set of disciplined implementation tools packaged in a just-in-time learning format for easy use by small improvement teams of six to eight employees.
Key innovations of the Action Workout method were:
- Speed (60 days from team launch to results);
- Simplicity (designed to leverage existing know-how and learn as you go, no upfront training for team members); and,
- Results (a focus on making decisions and taking action with built-in tools for documenting and reporting financial gains).
With the popularization of Six Sigma in the late 1990s, interest in Action Workout and other fast change methods like it declined. Many Six Sigma advocates criticized such methods as detrimental to the goal of creating a facts and data oriented culture. At many large companies deploying Lean Six Sigma, the use of Action Workout Teams was banned as dangerous reliance on “tribal knowledge”.
Through a partnership with Motorola University and study in Japan of the Toyota Production System, Leap Technologies “went back to the lab” to find a way to directly integrate Action Workout into Lean Six Sigma. The result of this ongoing innovation was the Rapid Action Process (introduced by Leap in 2006) that seamlessly blended the psychological triggers that create motivation to improve (Action Workout) with the scientific tools (Lean and Six Sigma) for ensuring sustainable results.
A Different Starting Point for Engaging Employees in Lean Six Sigma
Conventional Lean Six Sigma Deployments enroll employees in so-called Yellow or Orange Belt Programs that attempt to teach the fundamentals of Lean Six Sigma in hope of inspiring enthusiasm and effective participation on Belt-led projects to follow.
But these attempts at mass acculturation rarely achieve lasting results and often add to rank and file employee apathy and cynicism toward Lean Six Sigma. The reason f is common sense and is backed up by numerous studies on the drivers of employee engagement. People who don’t do “improvement for a living” are not turned on by the theories and tools of Lean Six Sigma.
What interests the frontline worker and manager most is whether or not giving discretionary time and effort (i.e., extra elbow grease) toward Lean Six Sigma will make a difference in their work lives. This perception of value is a not a function of how well the merits of Lean Six Sigma are presented.
The more potent driver of positive employee perception of Lean Six Sigma is productive engagement. The sooner employees have the opportunity to share what they think and know the more likely they will get interested and even excited about participating in an improvement project.
This is precisely why the first meeting of a Rapid Action Team focuses on idea sharing, not theory, tools and problem analysis. However, channeling the positive energy unleashed through brainstorming into focused improvement plans requires a carefully structured process that prevents people from falling into unproductive behaviors that cause meetings to bog down and motivation to drain.
Through more than a decade of experience and over 5,000 applications, Leap has engineered a highly reliable approach to balancing the psychological drivers of productive engagement (speed, simplicity and results) with Lean Six Sigma’s the science for sustainable, customer-focused improvement.
