5 Best Practices for Boosting Lean Engagement

However, the following are five components that must be rigorously addressed to develop an engaged workforce. They are interdependent categories that collectively enable engagement.

Remove demotivators. We need to remove anything that distracts and prevents the workforce from joining in our mission.

Provide purpose. We need to clarify the Why, the purpose that aims for the heart to create a motivational force.

Create a psychologically safe environment. We need to eliminate fear and create a safe environment where associates will openly share their ideas and concerns.

Install engagement methods. We need to create idea generation, analysis, and development mechanisms and practices to enable engagement.

Embed engagement. We need to incorporate the desired behaviors into supporting systems and policies.

Remove Demotivators

Demotivators are distractions that cause an associate to quit listening to your lean message. We often call this resistance, but often in these cases, employees haven’t yet heard anything to resist. They’re simply not listening. Trust has been lost.

The culture-killing roots of demotivation are a lack of fairness, equity and respect. Not being involved in changes that affect you; not even being given the rationale of why a change is being made; being ignored and not listened to; being set up for failure (whether intentional or not); not being treated as an equal and an intelligent human being who can learn and grow; not being compensated fairly.

These are only a few of the possible damaging demotivators that can crush your engagement efforts. But once you are assured that there are no demotivators lurking that would destroy workforce trust, you can move forward. Folks are at least listening!

Provide Purpose

We need to give people a reason to be engaged, speak up and act; to care. Without this, we have apathy where folks are simply going through the motions and doing the bare minimum of their jobs. We need to provide purpose and develop a motivational strategy that aims for the heart.

Clarify the purpose of an employee’s role, how it fits within their team and how the team fits into the broader purpose of the organization where everyone can contribute to something larger than themselves. We need to link purpose to other motivators, such as the opportunity to learn and grow,  to contribute ideas and be involved in the change that affects you, to have control. For engagement, we must intentionally give folks a reason to speak up and act, to care.

Create a Psychologically Safe Environment

Even if you’ve managed to have a critical mass of the organization listening to you—and they want to be engaged—you must create a “safe” environment so that folks will actually speak up and contribute. Desired behaviors such as highlighting problems and owning mistakes do not come easily for many of us, so the work environment must encourage these lean-aligned behaviors. For example, if an operator highlighting a problem faces a team leader’s disdain due to the possibility of stopping the assembly line, “safety” is removed. Problems will remain hidden, and improvement never initiated. Or if someone proposes an idea, but it’s quickly criticized and rejected without discussion, this will destroy safety. Why make a suggestion if all it does is open you up for ridicule? A key role of leaders at all levels must be to remove the fears that destroy safety and that set up roadblocks to engagement. Make the workplace physically and psychologically safe!

Install Engagement Methods

Even with a motivating and safe environment, nothing happens unless we have mechanisms for engagement, a place and time to act. Otherwise, all we do is create frustration. People want to participate, but we don’t provide a means to participate. Practices such as daily huddles and improvement time, kaizen events, formal idea systems and other problem-solving opportunities provide the means for engagement. Team leaders, project leaders and facilitators must receive training on how to effectively engage team members. The key is providing opportunities for early involvement, ideally at the idea-generation stage. People don’t usually resist what they helped to create. And early involvement builds ownership and emotional commitment. Engagement just doesn’t happen; you must install the implementation mechanisms.

Embed Engagement

We must incorporate engagement into supporting systems, policies and practices such as hiring, performance expectations, promotion and recognition. Otherwise, we are stating one thing, but endorsing alternative behaviors. “Therefore, It must not be as important as they said!” This misalignment would cause a loss of trust, and thus a demotivator will be created which will immediately stall any engagement efforts. (Refer to the above “Remove Demotivators” section.) Assuring alignment with the principles of Lean is a critical leadership responsibility to not only embed the desired behaviors into the DNA of the organization, but misalignment can be devasting to your mission.

Who’s Responsible?

Who’s responsible for building this culture of engagement? The short answer is formal company leaders at all levels. I’ve already noted this role in a few of the above categories. They always have, and always will, sit on the culture seat. Leaders must lead!  However, informal leaders such as project leaders and facilitators also have a key responsibility to be “employee engagers,” and every employee also has a role. For example, unfortunately, every employee has the power to demotivate by their disrespectful response to a teammate’s input or action. Leaders must be quick to address this damaging infraction.

Engaging the workforce increases the brainpower of the organization, and when this collective brainpower focuses on helping the company reach its goals via a lean strategy, it is not surprising that all performance measures move in the right direction. And since an engaged workforce continues to learn and grow, there is no ceiling on the brainpower and impact potential.

These five practices will significantly increase your chances of developing and sustaining an engaged workforce, which is the difference-maker in a company’s lean transformation.