COVID recovery: TWI Job Methods in times of crisis
WE have CHALLENGING TIMEs ahead, how are we utilising our most important assets?
The worst is far from over. Managers know challenging times lay ahead. Some managers don’t think of times like these as ideal for up-skilling their leaders. But there is a strong argument in favour of doing just that. Extraordinary times - extraordinary thinking…
Restarting daily production and service operations, trying to catch up on the backlog and claw back as much lost revenue as possible will be tough. It requires alls hands on deck.
But aren’t the best strategies in times of crisis bases on people’s hearts & minds? In extraordinary times like these, a clear focus on daily rapid, front-line improvement can unlock a lot of hidden potential.
Restarting production requires all hands on deck. But overcoming our kind of challenges requires hearts, minds and a method proven in times of crisis - TWI Job Methods.
This is where TWI Job Methods comes in. It was developed to accelerate improvement in times of extraordinary crisis, making an extraordinary contribution to the success of tens of thousands of companies.
It’s not enough to ask people to do their best. Leveraging their potential requires a quick to learn, method channels their ideas into well thought-through measures quickly and reliably.
Many of our clients expect supply and staffing challenges to linger for many weeks after lockdown measures are relaxed. The ability of front-line supervisors and teams to quickly create solid countermeasures that prevent problem recurrence, without the need for management intervention, will be of tremendous value.
But is it not too late for starting with TWI Job Methods now?
NO, and here is why….
what is the problem we need to solve?
The involvement of front-line people is essential to ‘getting to the bottom’ quality and productivity problems. Just relying on dedicated improvement experts and managers means we utilise only a small fraction of the improvement potential of our staff.
Front-line people are key to developing countermeasures, and debugging and stabilising the process once improvements are made. They live and breathe their processes every day. There are simply many more than dedicated improvement staff: more brains, deeper process know-how, more ideas, more capacity to experiment and implement. And we they need them to buy into any changes for improvements to work.
No matter how good and highly motivated our dedicated improvements experts are, they are simply no match for the collective power of front-line teams.
Managers who rely on experts to bring about improvement constrain creativity and create an improvement bottleneck… no chance of fast-paced improvement, no matter how hard the experts work!
With the repercussions of the Corona Crisis likely to linger for many months, now is the best time to build the improvement capacity in our front-line. We certainly have a pressing need and we have a proven way of making it work - TWI Job Methods.
what supervisor skills are needed to accelerate?
Front line employees are the best when it comes to improving front-line processes fast. Dedicated improvement staff, on the other hand, generally are not. Despite this, companies often rely for improvement on a handful of ‘improvement experts’, such as Blackbelts and Lean managers. These organisations miss out on enormous untapped creativity and the opportunity to dramatically accelerate process improvement.
But front-line teams need support in developing their improvement skills. Developing these skills and making sure they are practised consistently to improve process performance is one of the most important duties of supervisors and process improvement experts. And to do this effectively, they themselves must undergo a skills transition: supervisors must become effective improvement coaches.
When front-line teams develop improvement skills, and supervisors and improvement experts become effective improvement coaches, we unleash creativity and dramatically accelerate process improvement. TWI Job Methods is an excellent toolkit senior managers can use to make this happen.
One of the reasons why TWI Job Methods is so well suited for the challenge of accelerating improvement is, that it was designed specifically for this purpose. Making process engineering and improvement skills accessible to millions of people, so they could quickly streamline their processes, improve quality and reduce cost,
TWI Job Methods enables supervisors to become effective improvement coaches for their teams.
How does TWI Job Methods accelerate improvement?
TWI Job Methods (TWI JM), the foundational technique originally applied for Kaizen-style continuous improvement, provides a powerful pathway for getting the ideas out of our people and their help in putting them into effect quickly.
TWI JM develops the supervisor skill in developing and coaching their teams in:
studying and analysing their process,
generating many improvement ideas quickly,
testing and implementing solutions, and
checking impact and adjusting where necessary
By ensuring TWI JM is used systematically with front-line teams, senior managers can accelerate the pace of improvement in their operations and boost staff morale.
One of the principles of successful lean improvement is simplification. This is because in operations (as in life), most things that are complex just don’t stick. The challenge is to find an improvement method that is simple yet does not lack engineering depth & scientific rigor. And it needs to be easily scaleable, so we can involve a lot of people quickly.
To engage front-line people in fast-paced improvement, our method must be simple, yet with depth and rigour, and scaleable.
TWI Job Methods was developed for times like these, to quickly accelerate improvement across entire nations.
How easy is it to get started with TWI Job Methods?
Like all Training within Industry Methods, TWI Job Methods is a 4 step improvement routine that comes with a handy pocket card and a highly standardised training package. Each step has valuable guidance on what to look for and how to improve. The short 2-hour bursts of training throughout the training week are designed to fit into busy supervisor schedules. The immediate application of the methods with an experienced coach on site to help generates immediate, tangible improvements.
As teams practise the improvement pattern, they quickly get better and faster at improving. And with this, they quickly start generating Return on Training Investment (ROTI) for your organisation.
The TWI Job Methods improvement pattern is quick to teach and easy to learn using our standardised TWI Job Methods foundation training. This way, supervisors and front-line teams can start applying and practising TWI JM straight away.