Train for change
Burke was walking through the factory
floor one morning when he literally ran
into an OFI: “I’m walking by the table, and
I hit the table with my hip. One of the girls
standing next to me says, ‘I hit that thing all
the time.’ I say, ‘Why don’t you write up an
OFI to have it cut down?’ She wrote it up,
and just before I took this call, the maintenance department was cutting it. It’s so
simple. It’s a shelf on top of a table, and the
shelf is screwed in, and there’s no way to
move it, but you can cut it. It’s just a wood
shelf, so we just trimmed it. She’s been running into the damn thing for a year. That’s
empowerment.”
Though opportunities for improvement
abound, that doesn’t mean your employees
are always going to recognize them. They
need training, examples and a model to follow. Just as Burke pointed out that OFI to
his employee on the factory floor, you will
invariably need to help your own employees identify instances where change can
lead to improvement.
When an employee first joins your team,
Burke says the best way to bring them up
to speed is providing a plethora of examples from both ends of the spectrum.
“‘Here’s a colossal OFI — one that took
six months to implement and has sort of
changed the whole chart of this big ship,’”
he says. “‘Here’s one that was a very simple, common sense thing where we just
turned it this way instead of this way, and it
happened to save us 12 seconds.’”
To strengthen the habits of new and old
employees alike, Burke holds a monthly
OFI meeting in which he reviews changes
and shares the top three suggestions.
“Every month, we have a companywide
OFI meeting,” he says. “It’s a state of the
business, how we’re doing, what’s happening. ‘Let’s deal with some OFIs. We got in 52 or whatever that number was. We implemented 40. Let me give you three examples
of three great OFIs, and then I’m going to
tell you the OFI of the month.’”
Though each of these practices will better enable your employees to identify
opportunities for improvement at your
own company, Burke says the best way to
hone their skills is to personally review
their suggestions one-on-one. “I personally hand out the profit-sharing checks,” he
says. “I review with the employee the
OFIs they’ve submitted. In some cases, I
might talk to somebody, and they might
not have had any OFIs implemented. It
happens. I say, ‘What were you thinking?
Explain it to me. I think you got something there. Maybe if you did it this way;
what do you think of that?’”
The practice clearly entails a bit of extra
work, but Burke says it’s all worth it. By
walking your employees through the
process, they’ll become the agents of
change who will continuously improve
your business.
“Make the employees the change agents,”
he says. “Give them the forms to make the
change happen. ‘You don’t like something?
Write it up as an OFI. We’ll look at it. What
don’t you like? Let’s see if there’s a way to
do it better.’”
HOW TO REACH: Fire-Dex LLC, www.fire-dex.com or (330)
723-0000