Improvement Teams - Ze'ev Ronen - Business Excellence

This article focuses on the principles of managing employees during wartime.

Let us assume that we wish to improve the company’s profitability. The company sells 20 products. We then insert those items into a table - the product generating the highest profit will appear at the top row of the list, and the product generating the lowest profit will be the last item on the list. According to the Pareto principle, there is a good chance that the first four products on the list produce around 80% of the company’s revenues.

Work meetings take up time, and it's often wasted time. But there are also efficient meetings, that give a sense of purpose and a drive for change. I assume many of you are among those whose experience with meetings is that they're a waste of time. You leave every meeting frustrated, and have learned to stay quiet to make the meeting go faster.

In the past, when I managed Osem-Nestle’s factory in Yokne’am, we often had improvement teams working with internal leaders. For four years, we had a yearly workshop teaching employees how to lead improvements teams. The woman leading these workshops then led and managed the improvement teams, and coached the leaders. After four years, we transitioned to doing that internally as well.

In some companies, working with improvement teams brings quick, clear, and considerable success. On the other hand, in others the work done by improvement teams is accompanied by frustration, and has no quick and clear results. Why? What's the difference?

Facit is a famous example, but there were others. A recent example from Israel comes from the world of cellular parking services. I heard it from Ro'ee Elbaz, Pango's CEO ever since it was a small startup of four employees. In 2007 a tender for cellular paying services for parking was published by the center for local government.

American companies reward participants based on how much money was saved for the company as a result of their proposal. The rewards average 458 USD. Comparatively, Japanese rewards average 3.88 USD (less than a hundredth of American rewards).

I used to manage an organization with several hundred employees, under a collective agreement. The premium paid to employees who exceeded production goal was set in the collective agreement, old an anachronistic. It wasn’t a real encouragement and it didn’t contribute to motivation, and didn’t change employees' way of doing their work. 

In it they could see how, at the end of the work day on Thursday, at three in the afternoon, the door to one of the departments was left open. Actually, it wasn’t a door, but a wide gate, made of two metal doors. Its width is about three meters, its height about four meters.

Recommended frequency for discussion of indicators: I recommend all indicators' results be discussed by management once a month. At least once a week, they should be discussed in dedicated improvement teams with the relevant manager (operations, sales, finance, marketing, etc.) or their representative. Some indicators should be shortly analyzed daily, as needed.

When the team deals with sales development or debt collection, there is almost no new information on a daily basis, and so there's no need to meet daily. But work on the production floor is continuous and at the very least daily. So there are new developments every day. Should results be analyzed daily? Weekly? Monthly?

We often used the term motivation, but do we always mean the same thing? Last week I gave a talk in two classes in the School of Economics & Business Administration at the Ruppin Academic Center, as part of Dr. Adi Loria ("Select Issues in Management MBA"). The topic was "The Relationship between Management Methods and Employee Motivation".

What did it feel like, the last time you were complimented? For a nice outfit, doing well in school or on a successfully completed project? How did you feel posting about your kid's or grandkid's high grades on Facebook, or WhatsApp, and got dozens of likes?