A weekly newsletter about letting the workplace speak
Issue 32/Volume 3                www.VisualWorkplace.com                Aug 10, 2016
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Thought for the Week
A work area that has reached the showcase level demonstrates what a well-developed visual work environment looks like and how it functions. When we visit such a showcase, our own eyes tell us why visuality is important. Newcomers and visitors understand as well--along with people from areas in the facility that are not yet visual. And when they do, they get inspired and want their own areas to look and run like that also.

- Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, from Work That Makes Sense
Visual Poem/Puzzle
Listen to Gwendolyn this 
Thursday at 10am (Pacific) on
  


What company champion (site executive, CEO, plant manager, GM) does not seek ways to sustain and extend hard-won improvement results? But few executives rightly understand what sustainment means or how to attain and extend it. Instead, they mistakenly insist upon mechanisms that track--or even enforce--compliance: Audits are a case in point. But, says Gwendolyn Galsworth, they would do better to look for specific ways to use their positional power to: 1) cultivate employee engagement; and 2) drive improvement. In this week's show, Galsworth presents the third segment in her on-going discussion on "tools that sustain." This time she focuses on the role of the Management Champion (aka, site executive) and two mechanisms that champions can use to help drive the improvement process--without driving over employees in the process: The Management Watch and The Laminated Map.
   
Feature Article
Carve Out a New Role for Supervisors (Part 3 of 4)
(Encore Series) 
by Gwendolyn Galsworth, PhD

Letting value-add associates own the improvement outcome I call the visual where is a big step forward for most companies. But, as we have been discussing over the past two issues of The Visual Thinker, the impact of this can--and should--be more than a genuine opportunity for employee engagement. First we saw that operator-led visuality can be used as a lever to redefine the precious resource--time--by separating it into time for production and time for improvement. Second, the company can seize the opportunity of value-add level visuality by using it to build the power of operators to think and create. Operators become self-leaders--self-regulating because the workplace has become self-explaining. The following third outcome links so closely to that that we could say the empowerment of the hourly workforce causes it--supervisors and team leads are freed up to carve out a new role for themselves.

Outcome 3. Supervisors Become Leaders of Improvement

Billionaire Ross Perot said it perfectly: "Inventories can be managed. People must be led." The process of cultivating operator-led visuality provides important opportunities for supervisors to gradually transform themselves into improvement leaders, beginning with improvement coaches. This happens when a new working relationship is forged between a visual workplace trainer and area supervisors related to the visual workplace blitz--the visual blitz, for short.
 
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Visual Tricks and Treats
Great signs, clever visual devices, artistic or humorous graffiti. If you find one to share, send the image to [email protected]   
And the Visual Fail Prize Goes To...
Have you seen a Visual Fail that made you laugh?  Send the image to [email protected],
and we'll put it here and credit you with the funny find!