Undercover Boss ... Be One !!

Undercover Boss makes for good television. Imagine if you incorporated this methodology within your business operations, it would be the ultimate Continuous Improvement idea generator.

Show Format

CEOs from companies stealthily join the ranks of their own unsuspecting workforce. Each episode features a prominent executive from a company who goes incognito among their employees. The executive, in disguise, works with their staff who believe they are simply training a new recruit. Each “boss” takes an often emotional journey, discovering the effects their decisions have on others, the perception of the company, and who the unsung heroes of their workforce are. Most importantly, they learn how to apply what they have gained from the experience – both for their company and for themselves.[3]

There are some great lessons to be absorbed from the show:

• It shows poor leadership and understanding of process

• how as organizations grow leader are further removed from reality

• How being "really in" the business will make the Leader more effective "On" the business

• All Organizational Members are Professionals just demonstrating different skills based on position.

My first introduction into how powerful this can be happened many years ago when Brian Clement as the VP of Manufacturing at Steelcase Canada introduced the concept of "RUBBER FACTORY".

The premise of the Rubber Factory was that the plant could quickly scale output from 3,000 cubicles per day to 6,000 almost instantly. This was executed by every employee being trained to perform multiple functions. As the demand increased Brian would shut down specific departments and shift those employees into Production. He had a master plan where eventually all of the office and field sales employees were working on the shop floor except for the receptionist who continued to answer the telephone and take messages.

It was an extremely interesting and effective concept. If peak a requirement was necessary in essence the entire organizational structure was inverted. Shop employees were supervising office folks and performing strict quality checks. Even the site President was assigned to sweep the floors to keep the workplace clean.

The Rubber Factory was only designed to be triggered a couple times per year, but the awesome by-product was as office employees performed manual tasks in the factory they identified some excellent opportunities for improvement.

I was sold on the power of the concept and the magic of it remains etched in my brain.

Later in life I am running a plant and during the depth of winter our location got slammed with a significant snow storm. The majority of our employees could not make it into work, but many did and guess what our Customers still wanted our products.

Thinking of Rubber Factory ... we decided to have a "SNOW DAY"

We reassigned all of our office and non-production employees into production. Thankfully our people were quick learners and before long the plant was almost fully operational and as a team we were able to fulfill all of our customer requirements.

Then a big surprise at the conclusion. All of the reassigned employees expressed how much they enjoyed doing the manual work. They shared how much they had learned and then provided a very long list of improvements to our processes. In a specific instance we had asked one of our maintenance mechanics to run a particular machine where he had immediately gotten frustrated with the controls. He stopped the process and applied some of his talented knowledge to eliminate an ongoing problem that had plagued us forever. The final surprise was all of the employees stated that this is something we should do on a regular basis.

In an other instance I find myself in charge of Continuous Improvement for a Tier 1 Automotive part supplier. Labour is tight so it becomes an ongoing challenge to implement significant new Lean Methodologies.

Reflecting on Rubber Factory and Snow Day I came up with a concept of SPS WEEK (SPS means Stackpole Production System). Our plants ran 24-7 so training our workforce would be a monumental exercise, but not impossible.

So here is the route we decided to take. As a Leadership Team we selected a theme for our SPS Week (5S, TPM, Standard Work, etc). We also decided how we would measure success. I then developed a 2 hour Training Module and scoped every area of the plant and defined an Action Plan and potential Future State. I then trained several additional trainers to help with deployment.

We picked our SPS week of which 2 days were dedicated to delivering our training. During the training sessions all non-production staff was assigned to run processes in the facility while those employees were being trained. This also limited the size of our training sessions.

Following a "Learn - Apply - Audit" approach we decided to add some fun and competition into the mix. We decided that we would reward our teams in the following categories:

• Best Example

• Most Innovative

• Biggest Change

The winners would be awarded a cash prize that could be spent on improving their department but not towards Pizza or T-Shirts. The energy, excitement and engagement within the teams required us to defer the final judging until after the weekend. The contest ended up becoming very competitive and we declared our SPS week a huge success and in every case we moved the needle significantly forward.

Again, our non-production people found significant opportunities for improvement. But another attribute emerged. Our Production Employees did not have access to computers or simply did not have the skills required to complete some simple tasks. This was solved by creating "Team Time". Every week our non-production employees met with the their respective Production Team to help them in non-production ways.

SPS weeks were scheduled to run every quarter and in each instance we were able to deploy and create a critical mass of a specific Lean Methodology. Notice i said a "specific" we never attempted to encompass more than one methodology within an SPS week.

Our successes were varied, by focusing on 5S and TPM we were able to improve our Material Yield from 78% to 92% resulting in millions of dollars in savings to having speed bumps installed in the parking lot to slow down traffic.

Gemba walks are currently in vogue within the Lean Community but I challenge you to take it a step further and become an Undercover Boss to really feel, taste and touch a process and then you will truly enhance your respect for people and identify some excellent opportunities.

My final prompt that as you perform a specific task, ask yourself, would i want my child doing this as a career? If not, what can you change to make it better.