Imagine being in charge of a highly automated factory and
taking a stroll surrounded by a fortune in humming, efficient
machines. Now imagine noticing an occasional production
worker among the robotic machines carrying out a delicate
task or testing completed components.
"Too bad," you might mumble to yourself as you think of the
not-so-distant future when these workers will have little
more to do than dust the machines. But executives actually
taking these strolls today are noticing something else,
something troubling.
Production workers know ways to improve quality,
productivity, and cost effectiveness, and they recognize ways
to introduce flexibility -- ways only they can see. But you
can't take these people one-at-a-time and make much progress.
The pieces are spread across groups of people. And once you
identify improvements, it still takes coordinated effort to
implement them. This leads executives to teams.
Many companies are experimenting with team-based
management systems hoping to tap this resource. And few
settings present a greater challenge than manufacturing
plants.
Production workers in factories are a little different.
They enjoy working alone, performing repetitive tasks with
machines, and they aren't good candidates for team-based
management systems. But there they are, and we have to work
with them.
Rajiv Banker, of the University of Minnesota, recently
discovered a natural experiment in an electro-mechanical
assembly plant where the executives decided to implement
team-based management. The company allowed Banker's group to
examine the records, and to observe the implementation for 22
months. Banker's team was able to compare performance before
and throughout the change.
Three subassembly production lines and one final assembly
line made up the factory, and each line was formed into a
team, varying from 4-6 workers to 14-18 people. Groups met
weekly for an hour and were joined by a company facilitator,
a planner and an engineer assigned to the line, and the plant
manager.
Typical meetings followed an agenda which included
quality, the past week's accomplishments, customer delivery,
and deviations from the budget. Other topics included
problems with products in the field, changes in the customer
base, competitors' products, and business performance.
Ideas and problems that required action were recorded in
an action log, which noted who submitted the idea, who was
responsible for addressing it, and when it should be
completed. Subsequent meetings began by reviewing progress
of existing entries in the log. Teams were evaluated based
on the progress they made.
Seven primary team responsibilities served as a focus of
their efforts: quality, customer satisfaction, training, cost
awareness, safety, efficiency and comfort, and housekeeping.
Teams could spend $200 implementing ideas.
Banker compared the manufacturing defect rates before and
after the teams were introduced and found a 38% decline. He
also compared the ratios of the number of units produced to
total production hours, and found a 20% improvement.
So far, so good.
But a closer examination of the data found one of the
subassembly lines posting dramatic gains, while another
showed no improvement at all. The remaining teams posted
only modest gains. The difference seemed to lie in conflict
in the unresponsive team and strong cohesion in the
responsive team.
Keeping in mind the investment in team-based management,
Banker's findings point to selective implementation of this
new work arrangement. Cohesive groups whose members enjoy
each other's company are good candidates. Quarrelsome
isolates are not. And it calls to mind a management
principle that also needs repeating: managers must adapt to
meet the leadership needs of the people they lead, and
everyone is a little bit different from everyone else.
Managers must know their people and do a lot of adapting.
Team-based management is the right thing to do with some
people.
Reference: Banker, Rajiv D., Joy M. Field, Roger G. Schroeder, and
Kingshuk K. Sinha (1996). Impact of Work Teams on
Manufacturing Performance: A Longitudinal Field Study. Academy of Management Journal, 38 (4), 867-890.
Business Practice Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.
Team-Based Management
Researchers examine a new management system and discover its warts.