Mass production operations often have what they call work standards. They are really nothing more than quotas. In too many cases, whatever you do to fill that quota is fine, which is why mass production operations can put out such poor quality and be such barbaric places to work.

Lean operations have what sounds like a similar sort of thing: standard work. However, standard work and work standards are very different.

The work standards of mass producers are narrowly outcome-focused. If middle management dictates that a barrel must be filled with bolts by the end of the shift, that barrel will be filled with bolts, or something roughly resembling bolts, by the end of the shift no matter what it takes.

In contrast, standard work is process focused. When we design and use the right process based on the needs of the customer, there will be no problem producing enough well-made bolts to fill the barrel, if a barrel is even the right way to measure, pack, and/or ship bolts. The right process will produce the right result.

Mass producers put minimal effort into designing, mastering, and using processes. Instead, they fixate on the result, leaving them little ability to actually influence the result. That’s why they so often have high costs, long lead times, poor reliability, poor quality, and poor relationships between management and line level employees.

That said, there are five big reasons you must have, and use, standard work in a Lean organization.

Big Reason #1: If you don’t teach new employees the best way to perform a task, they will figure out how to do it on their own.

This is just common sense. The problem is that these new employees, or employees that have transferred from another part of the organization, won’t figure out a way of performing the task that uses the fewest resources. They won’t figure out a way that takes the least amount of time. They won’t figure out the way that produces the highest quality, or that best meets the needs of the customer.

Instead, they will figure out the way that is easiest for them to figure out, the way that is easiest for them to learn.

Now, having figured out the way that is easiest to learn, they will instantly become resistant to change.

In the long run, the business that allow this to go on will be riddled with processes that have been designed by people who, through no fault of their own, knew nothing and cared little about the the needs of the customer, the needs of the business, the resources available, or the system generally. This is a recipe for serious problems.

The best way — really the only way — to avoid this problem of suboptimal processes wedded to a resistance to change is to have standard work defined for every task, to train employees in standard work from the very beginning of their employment, and then expect them to use it.

Of course, it’s also necessary that they learn that suggestions for better ways to do the job are encouraged, and it’s very likely that the standard work will change in the future based on those suggestions, but for now they must master the existing standard work.

Big Reason #2: Edwards Deming said so.

Recall that there are four parts to the Deming cycle that Deming described in his famous 1950 speech in Hakone, Japan: customer survey, design, production, and sales or delivery.

The design step in this cycle isn’t merely design of a product. Design includes design of the processes used to produce any good or service.

If you doubt that design of the process is important, consider any number of tech companies — Amazon, Ebay, and Google, for example. None of these companies actually produce physical products. The main things they design are processes.

Design of a process means, in large part, defining the standard methods by which value is created. Standard work, then, is an integral part of the Deming cycle which essentially defines Lean. No standard work, no Lean.

Big Reason #3: Statistical control is impossible without standard work.

Lean process improvement is often heavily dependent on the use of statistics to measure the state of a process. If you don’t have and use standard work, if every employee is doing his own thing, you don’t have a process to measure. Instead, you have as many processes to measure as their are employees doing their own thing.

If you treat this mass of processes as one process, it’s extremely unlikely you will get good results from any statistical analysis. Oh sure, you can still calculate a mean and a standard deviation, but unless you have a very large number of employees, a plot of the results is very unlikely to look anything like the standard normal distribution (bell-shaped curve) that is the underlying assumption of such numbers. Any decisions you make based on such faulty analysis will simply compound the problem of not having standard work.

Big Reason #4: It’s the GIGO principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Remember that any organization is a system — a collection of components that interact to produce an outcome. A large portion of the interactions in a system are customer/supplier relationships. When you lack standard work in any one component, that component produces random outputs, which become random inputs for the next component in the system, for the customer component.

If this customer component of the system is able to correct the random problems sent it by the supplier component, it suggests that the supplier could have solved the problem itself. If those random problems aren’t corrected, and the customer component passes them along while adding randominy of its own, you quickly end up with a chaotic production system. I’ve seen it. I know. You must have and use standard work everywhere in the organization.

Big Reason #5: Standard work helps identify problem personalities that can destroy an organization.

A business consultant once told me that among the first questions she asks new clients is how much sabotage they have in the workplace. At first it struck me as a really odd question.

On further reflection I realized the brilliance of it. A small percentage of people I have worked with have routinely done small things, and some big things, that undermine the effectiveness of the organization. I’d never thought of that as sabotage, but is indeed sabotage. Sabotage always directly affects the bottom line, and is always destructive.

I’ve worked with managers of astonishing brazenness and dishonesty. I’ve worked with people known for taking long bathroom breaks during clean-up time at the end of the day; people who take an hour to do a 15-minute job in the obvious hope that their coworkers will complete the less pleasant task up next; people who occasionally (or frequently!) decide not to follow the simplest standard operating procedures, throwing processes into chaos; moody people who can write neatly but, in one of their moods, will illegibly scrawl critical instructions; people who leave subtle flaws in engineering drawings, flaws that are nearly impossible to spot until the final part is carefully inspected, flaws that must be expensively corrected by hand.

There is no question that these people have been well trained, are quite capable of understanding the ramifications of what they are doing and are quite capable of not doing them, but they do them anyway.

Why?

Two reasons: First, they generally believe they are better than than their coworkers and/or bosses, often resent having to work with their inferiors, so feel entitled to behave that way. Second, there is nobody to stop them (hint: standard work will stop them).

A person who believes he is entitled to sabotage the work of his employer has a problem. In my experience that problem is almost always a disordered personality. Sometimes that personality problem rises to the level of a full-blown personality disorder. Psychologists and psychiatrists can’t fix personality disorders, and generally won’t try. You shouldn’t try, either.

Instead, after a person has been well trained, there is a sure-fire five step process for dealing with disordered personalities committing sabotage in the work place: 1) warn them; 2) warn them; 3) write them up; 4) write them up; 5) fire them.

The critical step to stopping these people, the very first thing you must do, before you can properly train your staff, before you can warn these people with disordered personalities, before you can write them up, before you can fire them, is to have and use standard work.

Only with standard work that every other employee is capable of performing (with reasonable accommodation, if necessary, of course), is expected to perform, and does routinely perform, can you have an objective standard which makes the disturbed personality stand out, and which provides solid grounds for firing the saboteur.

You must have, and use, standard work.

 

Copyright 2015 by Paul G. Spring. All rights reserved.