Listen to your employees
Some time ago, a friend of mine related to me how his company hired a consultant to explore ways to turn the company around by cutting costs and get back to profitability. After a couple of months, a list of recommendations were given to the management who then took it down to the floor staff to have them implemented. There were grumblings from the staff and they said the recommendations were the sames one that they have been telling management for months, maybe years, which management have brushed aside. Now, they are paying big bucks for consultants to come and tell them the very same thing.
I opined then to my friend that unless the consultants have deep knowledge of the industry and owns the IP for some of the best practices elsewhere, in all likelihood, they would have interviewed the company's staff to come out with the set of recommendations, which, would be the same ideas that the employees have been telling all this while. If we stop listening, after some time, the employees will stop telling. Thus, we should never underestimate the knowledge our employees have of the business.
This story of the empty soap box will illustrate this point very well.
One of the most memorable case studies on Japanese management was the case of the empty soap box, which happened in one of Japan's biggest cosmetics companies.
The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soap box that was empty. Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason unknown to them, one soap box managed to go through the assembly line empty.
Management asked its engineers to solve the problem. The engineers worked feverishly to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soap boxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty.
No doubt it was a moderately viable solution but they spent a phenomenal amount of money and resources to develop and implement this idea.
Amidst all this fuss, when a rank-and-file employee came to hear about this problem, he offered management a jaw-droppingly simple solution: point a strong industrial electric fan at the assembly line. As the soap boxes pass the fan, any empty ones simply get blown off the line.
Solutions are not always complex even if the problem appears complex.
I opined then to my friend that unless the consultants have deep knowledge of the industry and owns the IP for some of the best practices elsewhere, in all likelihood, they would have interviewed the company's staff to come out with the set of recommendations, which, would be the same ideas that the employees have been telling all this while. If we stop listening, after some time, the employees will stop telling. Thus, we should never underestimate the knowledge our employees have of the business.
This story of the empty soap box will illustrate this point very well.
One of the most memorable case studies on Japanese management was the case of the empty soap box, which happened in one of Japan's biggest cosmetics companies.
The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soap box that was empty. Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason unknown to them, one soap box managed to go through the assembly line empty.
Management asked its engineers to solve the problem. The engineers worked feverishly to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soap boxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty.
No doubt it was a moderately viable solution but they spent a phenomenal amount of money and resources to develop and implement this idea.
Amidst all this fuss, when a rank-and-file employee came to hear about this problem, he offered management a jaw-droppingly simple solution: point a strong industrial electric fan at the assembly line. As the soap boxes pass the fan, any empty ones simply get blown off the line.
Solutions are not always complex even if the problem appears complex.
posted by Guy in the glass at 10:00 PM
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