Vedzen is a top lean consulting company. In the last two decade, we helped many organization to transform traditionally owned business into a lean organization through lean-kaizen consulting. Our team is expertise in lean, Kaizen and operational excellence implementation. We trained more than 10000 individual to become a lean champion. We successfully completed more than 500 assignments of lean implementation in various sectors (Manufacturing, Construction, Healthcare, Banking and Services).
Lean is a long term process of establishing lean culture to create a world-class organization. Lean majorly focuses on developing people to improve process by eliminating operational waste. Lean organizations seeking improvement and continuous learning of new things. An efficient lean culture strives to cut down on inefficiency and waste whilst ameliorating the value given to clients. Historically, a lean organization is a model that has been applied to manufacturing however several principles are relevant for businesses in multiple industries.
The lean business model is quite alluring to many assorted businesses but several don't consider the crucial role culture has in implementation. Educating people on the concepts and giving the tools is only a small chunk of the process. The best way to obtain the results of a lean organization is for employees to dedicate themselves to continual improvement. A feedback tool like a 360-degree performance appraisal system can be used to assess how employees adapt to new lean techniques. It's necessary to keep tabs on company morale due to the introduction of changes. If the culture doesn't change, companies can encounter difficulties in fully accepting the lean organizational model.
Every organization has a distinctive culture. This holds true whether the organization founds and maintains the culture deliberately or if it takes the root of it's own accord without guidance from the upper echelons of the company.
Company culture includes many aspects. It is the company's personality shared values and beliefs and the manner in which those beliefs and values are articulated. It also encompasses standards and rules that people within the culture are expected to adhere to.
When a culture isn't intentionally created, people create it themselves. Basically, if the culture isn't established it will be learned mainly through experience. An individual observes how other people behave, the values they show and gradually learns from them.
In a culture that's been intentionally established people learn via experience and are influenced by the established values of the company. Thus, the result is the cultural aspects experienced by these employees are more in accordance with lean principles.
important note: company culture won't automatically change in terms of processes, concepts and tools when a company chooses to comply with the lean business model. the culture requires guidance so that the model's requirements can be met.
A behavioural framework must be created in order to develop a new company culture. Leaders must ascertain the values that the culture represents and the behaviours that must be reinforced to maintain it.
In addition to this, it's vital to consider the competency models and skills necessary for enabling a lean culture to thrive in your business. Training can aid people in making the transition and other educational methods can be employed to expand the new culture and establish it.
Combining Lean Culture with Policies
Once this framework in place, policies must be developed that connect the new culture with the lean business model.
When the framework has been set up, policies must be created that link the lean business model with the new culture.
This can comprise changes in recruiting, training, performance evaluations, internal communications, promotions, reward programs and more. Company leadership will have to co-ordinate with the human resources department to make these policies and guarantee their proper implementation.
"IF EVERYONE IS MOVING FORWARD TOGETHER, THEN SUCCESS TAKES CARE OF ITSELF" - HENRY FORD
Top-Down Implementation
Framework building and policy creation are essential parts of establishing a lean culture, but leaders should also lead by example. If leaders don't model the right processes, values and behaviours, the new culture is unlikely to spread and be established in the rest of the company. Informing people is one way of spreading awareness of a change but in order to maintain a lean culture, it is primarily examples and experience that must be learned from and reinforced.
It takes time to develop a new culture. Employees will make efforts to adopt new processes and behaviours immediately but the culture can only amalgamate fully if there's a continuous push for change. Leaders should be considerate if employees struggle to adapt initially but they must continually promote the right behaviours and values. Eventually, it might even be essential to replace employees who cannot or will not adjust to a lean culture.
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