We Spend Much More Time on Failure-Related Work than Our Executive Managers Realize
The Challenge
Organizations are in a constant state of reactive/crisis management and there is never enough time or resource to get all the work done. Reducing budgets is the order of the day with minimal consideration of longer term consequences. What front line employees continue saying is they don't have enough time to do the things that need to get done. How do we move an organization that has constraints on resources from just responding to the crisis of the day and begin taking the actions that are more proactive and prevent the problems of tomorrow?
The Core Problem
Executives/managers have no idea how much time is spent by the front line workers on failure related work efforts.
As budget reductions take place they don't consider the current time spent on failures or allowing time or resources to conduct root cause analysis and implementing corrective actions. This leads to a redundancy of the same failures occurring again and again and drains the remaining resources even more. Without regard to this, the wrong resources get cut. Failures don’t automatically go away with a budget reduction and usually increase after one is done!
GRI Helps Teams Evaluate and Prioritize their Work Flow Tasks
In our GRI front line workshops we establish a clear definition of four the different types of tasks that are performed. This is followed by an inquisition as why each tasks is performed. Then we measure each one to create an initial estimate with the participants to estimate where current resources are being utilized for each one. As part of this work we want to get a mindset change of the front line workers to realize that if they don't focus on taking the actions necessary to permanently eliminating the failures then their probability of getting all of their work done is seriously compromised.
Most front line workers come to realize that with more than 25% of their work efforts spent on failures they need to invest some of their time into preventing them. The payoff is bigger than 2 to 1, thus an excellent return and the pathway for finding more time and improved profitability is realized.
