Christoph Roser | AllAboutLean.com

Employee Motivation and Lean Implementation – Part 4: Respect for People

April 5, 2021July 18, 2017 by Christoph Roser

Motivating employees is not easy. In previous posts I described that the carrot and the stick approaches don’t work very well. What in my experience works best to improve the system is Respect for People!

This is actually a very important aspect of the Toyota Production System, and Toyota puts in lots of effort to show respect to all people. This includes not only employees (the focus of this post), but also customers, suppliers, neighbors, and pretty much everybody else it comes in contact with. At Toyota, it is actually called Respect for Humanity (人間性尊重, ningenseisoncho). Unfortunately, all too often I find this lacking in Western lean implementations.

Employee Motivation and Lean Implementation – Part 3: Lack of Respect

April 5, 2021July 11, 2017 by Christoph Roser

Motivating employees for change is tricky. What often helps is respect, but in reality the opposite is common. While managers claim that of course they respect their people, the employees feel very differently, and quite often there is a lack of respect. In this post I want to talk about this lack of respect and why it happens, before showing how to do it better in the next post.

Employee Motivation and Lean Implementation – Part 2: Money

April 5, 2021July 4, 2017 by Christoph Roser

Lean improvements often fail in implementation, meaning the employees do not follow the new standards. In my last post we already saw that pressure (“the stick”) doesn’t work very well. The second option is the carrot. In this post I will show different “carrots” that are sometimes used to get employees to follow the new standard. However, most of them won’t work very well either. What often works best is actually simply treating people with respect – but I will talk about this in my next post.

Employee Motivation and Lean Implementation – Part 1: Carrot and Stick

April 5, 2021June 27, 2017 by Christoph Roser

All too often, good ideas for a lean implementation fail because workers won’t use the new ideas. They simply stick to their old habits. And, no matter how good the ideas are, if they are not used, then the improvement project is a failure. In this post I want to talk about this common problem in industry. The solution is – in theory – easy: Get your people motivated! Doing this in reality, however, is an extremely challenging task with an often-unknown outcome.

Changeover Sequencing – Part 2

October 28, 2021June 20, 2017 by Christoph Roser

This second post on changeover sequencing looks at the complexity of changeover options, how to optimize the sequence, and how to communicate it reliably to the shop floor planners. (First post here.)

Changeover Sequencing – Part 1

April 5, 2021June 13, 2017 by Christoph Roser

The sequence of your changeover can have quite an impact on the duration of the changeover. In this series of posts I will show some approaches on how to improve your changeover durations by carefully sequencing the products. This was initially intended to be one post, but as so often happens, it turned out to be more complex than initially thought, and hence I have split it into two posts. The next post will appear next week.

On Running Changeovers

May 16, 2023June 6, 2017 by Christoph Roser

Changeover times and their reduction are popular topics in lean manufacturing. In this post I would like to introduce the idea of running changeovers for production lines. The idea behind it is simple, and probably many of you do it already. Nevertheless, I have found little info on it online. I also would like to go into more detail on the benefits of a running changeover in comparison to the alternatives.

The Phases of a Changeover

April 5, 2021May 30, 2017 by Christoph Roser

A changeover is changing the set-up of a process from one product to the next. Reducing changeover times is a common and popular way to decrease inventory or to increase available work time (see SMED). Ideally, the changeover time should be zero, allowing true one-piece flow. In reality, however, it is often not zero. This post looks in more detail at the different phases of a changeover to help you understand the process better and to reduce your changeover times.