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Guest Column: Lean <strong>Business</strong> Randall Benson | Lean Operations Randall Benson is a management consultant, author, and Lean master working out of Whatcom County. You can visit his blog “The Lean Heretic” at www.leanheretic.com, and his website at www.bensonconsulting.com. The power of respect in Lean Dr. Alan Dobzyniak, the highly respected medical chief of staff for Oakwood Health System in Michigan, stood before about 100 of the hospital’s leaders at their annual awards ceremony. He began to talk, and emotions overcame him. He paused, regained his composure, and began again, “In the 20 years that I’ve been on staff at this hospital,” he said, “this is the first time that management actually asked the staff what they thought we should do—and look at the incredible results!” Respect for people is the hallmark of the famed Toyota Lean method. It’s the defining element that distinguished Toyota from previous methods of process improvement. When your Lean initiative builds on respect for people, expect magic. Consider Dr. Dobzyniak and Oakwood Health’s story. At the awards ceremony, he was referring to Oakwood’s creation of the nation’s fastest emergency room operation.. Oakwood’s ER had been dangerously overcrowded and visitors often waited hours to see a doctor. It was not uncommon to find Patients and loved ones huddling outside the ER in freezing weather because there were no seats, or even standing room, inside. Just nine months after instituting Lean principles, and extending to ER staff the authority to explore and apply their own ideas, they the Spirit of Healing is Genuine Kindness Genuine kindness. Unwavering compassion. Dedication. That’s how our friends and colleagues describe our promise at PeaceHealth. We call it The Spirit of Healing. Vanessa Parry, RN PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center, Bellingham, WA The Spirit of Healing is our promise to you. Because we believe in healing the mind, body and spirit. Every time. Every touch. Hear stories of our healing spirit at www.peacehealth.org 102 | BUSINESSPULSE.COM
7 Ways to Demonstrate Respect for Employees 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Be clear about the ends, but let employees determine the means. Invite employees to participate in improving their own work processes. Encourage staff exploration, discovery, and application. Avoid asking staff to blindly execute someone else’s plan. Place high value on the experimental method. Celebrate well-run experiments, regardless of the outcome. Allow your staff to stop the process when they see something gone awry. Celebrate learning from mistakes and improving processes. Allow employees the latitude to fix customer problems and carry out service recovery. made a remarkable transformation: The nation’s first guaranteed 30-minute ER! Further, they established new benchmarks for almost every aspect of emergency care delivery. • Instead of waiting hours to be seen, patients received evaluation by a doctor within 15 minutes on average. • Patient length of stay was reduced by 70 percent. • Overcrowding was nonexistent. A visitor would find only a few family members in the waiting room. • Satisfaction scores skyrocketed. • Word of mouth spread, and Oakwood rapidly attracted new patients to the system, producing a financial turnaround. The ER leader, Corrine Victor, earned recognition as the VHA Healthcare Leader of the Year for these accomplishments. By any measure this was a breakthrough, not just for Oakwood, but also for emergency room care throughout the United States. More than 80 media reports told Oakwood’s story, and dozens of other hospital systems visited them for tours and insights. The value of the Oakwood story lies not just in its successes, but also in the perspective of how they got there. It was not their first, but their fifth try. Yes, fifth. Oakwood tried and failed to fix the same ER four times in a five-year span. Not until they implemented Lean care delivery, anchored with newfound respect for staff, did they achieve, and exceed, their objectives. When I first met Corrine, she handed me the four thick consulting reports prepared for her over those years. The reports contained many suggestions, often based on Lean principles, for every aspect of ER operations. The staff did its best to comply with the recommendations, but the overcrowding and long waits continued. The consultants’ reports all revealed the same fatal flaw: lack of respect for employees. Previously, the external experts analyzed the information they gathered from staff and made their recommendations. Managers and staff members were expected to simply implement the expert’s untested ideas. During the four failed attempts, staff members never became masters of their own fate. Oakwood failed to improve because it didn’t honor the key hallmark of Lean: respect for people. Corrinne, as the ER chief executive, asked me to help her create a quest – a journey of exploration and discovery in which we invited staff to search for their own solutions. If they achieved what we termed a “big change,” a breakthrough innovation, they could apply it to their ER. The team engaged vigorously in their quest, running almost 200 experiments and making dozens of innovative changes. During the nine-month journey, they used their collective genius to discover and ultimately apply their “big change.” The result – the nation’s fastest ER – was a breakthrough far beyond their expectations. The biggest difference was how their ideas and their capabilities for innovation were respected and celebrated. In Oakwood’s case, respect for people meant granting them the authority to explore, to discover, and to apply employee-developed ideas. Oakwood described this to the press as “employee-driven innovation.” However you describe it, that respect might make the difference between pedestrian results and a strong, positive and prosperous breakthrough. The difference that choked up a chief of staff. How does your organization demonstrate respect for people? How would you describe the results? Send me a note at rbenson@bensonconsulting.com. I’d love to share your stories. WHATCOMBUSINESSALLIANCE.COM | 103
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