How does your team stay sharp, motivated and engaged? By starting from what affects your people in the team, and not just from rules and regulations. It turns out to be a tried-and-tested approach, which helped the interdisciplinary team that was struggling with the delivery reliability of products with ingredients dangerous to humans.
1. Seeing What are the hard and soft factors influencing the current situation and low delivery reliability, respectively? Critical look at the status with human factors as a capstone and, to complement the programme, guest speaker in the field of disaster management to share additional knowledge and experience. The identified factors are categorised according to the TOP (Technology, Organisation, Person) framework.
2. Influencing How can we break the status quo? Investigation of everyone’s ability to switch and determine matters themselves, respectively conclusion that both further standardisation and also behavioural compliance are necessary to increase delivery reliability, especially if technical improvements are not possible for a while.
3. Strengthen How can we keep up the movement? Coaching and training on hard and soft skills to be able to move ‘on the go’ and keep a grip on performance, quality and relationships, respectively highlighting intervention forms in case of calamities, mimicking and defining and training desired behaviour.
Result
Many small steps ultimately ensured that the absolute number of incidents remained constant. In particular, the standardisation of shift composition and strict adherence to the updated protocol in case of production deviations proved to bear immediate fruit. Under control or even improvement? Both, when measured against the interim turnover growth of 30%. Once again, human influence proved to have been more far-reaching than we often think.
Net time spent client
2 workshops.
By the way, the following study on team challenges and opportunities may be of your interest.