How to Engage your Front-Line Teams

What is Employee Engagement?

We hear a lot about the importance of having engaged employees, but what does this mean? Engaged employees are aware of and motivated by the company’s business goals and adopt those as their own personal goals at work.

Practically this means that engaged employees will work every day to improve the performance of their work area. They won’t need to be told to make improvement, they will want to make improvement.

Why Does Engagement Matter?

Human beings are intelligent and creative creatures. Every single employee in your business can apply their intelligence to make improvements and solve problems. Unfortunately, in many businesses we work with, especially large businesses, we find that employees do just the bare minimum that is required of them.

They do what they are told to do and nothing else. Solving problems and making improvements are the preserve of managers and professional staff such as engineers and quality professionals. This leads to several negative consequences:

• Managers and engineers are often run off their feet reacting to everyday problems and instructing front-line teams what to do.
• Early warning signs of problems are often missed leading to major problems or line stoppages.
• Front-line staff are often bored and frustrated and lose respect for their leaders who don’t seem to be able to solve the problems that affect them every day. This tends to reinforce the disengagement.
• The rate of improvement in performance is very slow, or non-existent and employee morale will be low.

Why are Your Employees Not Engaged?

When I was first starting out in manufacturing 40 years ago, one of my mentors used to always remind me that “no one comes to work to do a bad job”. If you doubt this statement, consider if your employees really did come to work to do a bad job. As they got ready in the morning and drove or caught the train to work, they would be thinking “what can I do wrong today?”, “how can I really mess things up for my company?”.

Of course, your employees don’t get up every morning with the deliberate intention of doing a bad job. No one does, and no one wants to work in an organisation that is failing to achieve its targets. Everyone wants to be part of success.

So, given that everyone wants to do a good job and be part of a successful organisation, why do so many organisations fail to engage their employees? What we observe in many organisations is a lack of genuine two-way communication between managers and front-line employees about the things that matter to those employees.

Of course, most large businesses will have town hall meetings where they talk about the overall direction of the business and issues of general interest to the workforce such as restructuring or compliance concerns. These are important, however the information of most interest to any employee will be information that relates directly to them, their work area and their team.

Unfortunately, this is the information that is most often lacking. Therefore, front-line teams often must “infer” how their area is performing and the measures of success that are important to them. These inferences can be based on the feedback (negative and positive) that they occasionally get from supervisors or managers. Often, the measure of success can be simply getting through the shift without having too many problems (even if it means passing those problems on to the next shift).

As well as a lack of feedback about how their work area and themselves individually are performing, front-line employees (particularly those on shift) lack opportunities to communicate issues and concerns upwards. I like to say that the number one expert on any job in your business is the person doing that job.

However, in many organisations the input of front-line employees is not sought regarding changes to the workplace and there is no effective mechanism to provide feedback, raise issues or share ideas upwards. Even if you are a manager, you will know that it can often be intimidating to provide feedback or raise concerns with your boss.

Imagine how much more difficult that is for a front-line employee who has limited information about their own performance to raise an issue with their boss. It is hardly surprising that they often delegate to job of raising their concerns to a trade union official! In this environment, it is hardly surprising that front-line team members become frustrated and disengage. So how do you turn this around?

Improving Employee Engagement

As you will have gathered from the previous section, the key to improving employee engagement is effective two-way communication. Communication needs to be highly relevant, frequent and two-way. Achieving this cannot happen by accident. You need a process to ensure that it occurs and is effective. To achieve this at TXM we rely on our Lean Daily Leadership Process® (LDLP). LDLP relies on a combination of visual management and leadership development tools such as leader standard work.

Measuring Performance

The first step to establishing LDLP is to establish simple meaningful measures at the team level. These need to ultimately align with the overall measures and goals of the organisation but should not be imposed top down. In one business we came across a large visual management board with around 30 metrics that were maintained by a quality person. The front-line staff took little notice and were instead intimidated by all the numbers.

Instead, start with a discussion with the team leader and their team. What do they regard as the key measures of success for their area? How can they measure it. Keep measures simple. I like measures that are a simple count such as the number of products made, or the number of defects recorded. Often a perfectionistic approach to metrics leads to overly complex measures such as ratios or percentages that are not well understood or trusted. With new metrics, it can pay to just record them initially to understand them better before you set targets.

To be effective, measures need to be timely and recorded frequently. While monthly and quarterly accounts are important measures for business, at the factory floor, you need to measure what matters at least daily or more frequently – by shift or by hour.

Ideally the numbers should be recorded by the front-line teams. At TXM we still find that manual visual management boards deliver the greatest engagement. This is because the very act of recording performance ensures that the team leader knows and is engaged in what they are measuring.

Digital tools are effective in collecting data in real time and recording actions, but when they are used, they are most effective alongside manual recording. If digital tools are used, then they need to be highly responsive to the team and allow for two-way feedback, rather than just providing top-down information. If digital tools are used in daily meetings, they need to be easy and quick to use and update, as team focus is quickly lost if the leader of the meeting is spending too much time trying to wrangle a menu and a keyboard on a touchscreen. Task manager tools need to be carefully managed as managers, and support functions can be quickly overwhelmed with actions and then struggle to prioritise them. This then reinforces the perception among front-line teams that “nothing gets done around here”.

Communicating Performance

Just recording daily or shift performance data will provide teams with feedback about their performance, however if numbers are never discussed then little improvement is likely to result. The numbers soon become “wallpaper”. Therefore, where a team is recording performance on a visual board, they should have a short daily stand-up meeting to discuss performance.

This meeting should be held in their workplace (or nearby if noise is a problem) and should be limited to no more than 10 minutes with a clear agenda. The meeting should focus on each area of performance and discuss the previous day or shift’s result.

Where results are on target, this should be acknowledged and, where they are off target, the team should discuss why this occurred and what actions they can take for the current shift to be on target and even catch up the lost ground. Simple structured problem solving such as Solving Problems Every Day® can be very effective in this.

The daily meeting provides an opportunity for team members to raise issues and ideas and for these to be addressed by the team or, where support or resources are needed, escalate these issues. Lean Daily Leadership Process® typically involves two or three levels of daily meeting so that issues can be quickly communicated to the right level for action:

• Level one meetings are between a team leader and their front-line team – usually 5-10 employees working in an area of the factory.
• The team leader will then attend a level two meeting with their manager, other team leaders and support functions such as maintenance and quality. Daily problems that cannot be resolved in the Level one meetings will be resolved in the level two meeting.
• Finally, the level 3 meeting is between managers and the site leader. This is where major issues get resolved and policy and messages that need to be communicated down the organisation get discussed. In many businesses, level 3 meetings are held weekly.

Going to the Workplace

 Apart from the daily meeting structure, managers and senior leaders need to frequently go to the workplace to understand how the plant is performing. These walks need to be regular and structured. We recommend that the manager visit each work area alongside their direct report who is responsible for that area. This shows support for that person in their role. In visiting the factory floor the manager needs to:

• Go See: Observe the process and notice what is occurring. When things are not to standard they need to notice – the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
• Show Respect: Ask front-line teams what they consider are their key issues before you tell them. Demonstrate active listening so that know that you are engaged in their world. When you make commitments to address something they have raised, make sure you follow through and do it when you say you will do it. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
• Ask Why: When things are not to standard you need to ask why. This needs to be done in a respectful rather than accusatory way and you need to actively listen to the answer. The aim is to approach the shop floor with curiosity and a desire to learn what are the issues driving or preventing on-target performance rather than trying to find who to blame.

Sticking to It

With the best of intentions, the daily avalanche of issues to be solved often mean that managers and supervisors struggle to sustain their daily meeting routine and daily walks. This is self-defeating, since by failing to engage employees, more issues end up landing on the managers’ desks making them too busy to support their teams and driving lower and lower engagement. To break out of this cycle, we coach leaders at all levels to develop a checklist of daily routine tasks that they need to complete to maintain employee engagement. This is often called leader standard work.

The problem with the term “standard work” is that implies all time is scheduled. This is unrealistic as managers need to be able to respond quickly when issues occur. Therefore, TXM aims for daily routine tasks to occupy no more than 15%-30% of the manager or team leader’s day. Most of these tasks will not have a specific scheduled time but need to be completed during the course of the day.

Tasks for front-line leaders such as team leaders will be a mix of practical tasks such as checking material availability, routine safety and maintenance checks and leadership tasks such as running the daily meeting, supporting new employees and recording daily performance. For more senior leaders, leadership tasks such as daily shop floor walks are the major activities. It is very important that leaders develop their own lists of tasks rather than having them enforced upon them. A simple question is to ask a team leader, “what are the things that you need to do every day to set up your team for success”.

Initially the routine tasks can seem onerous and be prepared to adjust the lists if this becomes a problem. However, over time, the daily routines build habits and become second nature for the leaders.

The Difference Engagement Makes

In our experience engaged front-line teams deliver higher levels of operational performance. Issues are raised and addressed quicker, ideas for improvement get implemented rapidly and teams are more willing to go the extra mile to help the company achieve its goals. Equally importantly engaged employees tend to have lower absenteeism, lower employee turnover and improved morale. In unionised environments this can lead to improved industrial relations.

The steps to improve engagement are simple, but require discipline and persistence. The Lean Daily Leadership Process provides a practical and effective way to improve communication and engagement while developing effective leaders who support their people. Call us today to find out how we can help you improve performance by engaging your front-line teams.