This article is written by Steven Pleasant, innovation team lead, City of Hillsboro

The woman was crying. It was a little uncomfortable to see her sitting in the middle of a room filled with her co-workers, embarrassed about the tears that flowed as she was overcome with sudden emotion. She was saying, “In 15 years of working here, this is the first time anyone ever asked me what I thought.”

I wish I could say I was stunned, but it’s a story I’ve heard dozens of times over the last 25 years in both private and public sector organisations.

My job is to help individuals and teams solve problems. For the last seven years, I’ve been employed at a wonderful city in the US Pacific Northwest where we offer a workshop two or three times a year in which we teach Lean Six Sigma principles to employees interested in learning the concepts. Sometimes they cry and that’s okay.

Getting comfortable

Each workshop begins with a warm-up to get people more comfortable in the space.

We have everyone line up in a half-circle ordered by how long they’ve worked at the city. We then ask them to share a little about what they do and insight about how they view themselves, like what kind of automobile or what type of musical instrument they would be.

It’s important to have everyone hear their own voice in the space and begin forming a bond. We then count off by threes to distribute the teams evenly by tenure, which ensures each team has a range of perspectives on the organisation from most senior to newest.

Once people settle in, we begin asking how individuals feel about the work the organisation does. “What is the city here to do and are we any good at it?”

we ask our city manager, who is the city's chief executive and reports to the city council, to drop by at the start of each session and offer support for the program and reassure attendees that we value their insight

Progressively, the questions that follow become more specific until we arrive at their department or team. We also shift from asking what we are good at to asking what could be better. It’s fairly common for employees to be reluctant to speak their mind, so we ask our city manager, who is the city's chief executive and reports to the city council, to drop by at the start of each session and offer support for the program and reassure attendees that we value their insight.

Often this is enough to overcome their apprehension and get the flow of ideas started. We are very careful to clearly state it’s not a complaint session about anyone’s boss or the pay rise they think they deserve. It’s about being the best organisation we can be in service to our community.

Over the course of one day, we work to develop a common understanding of why the city exists and then to align each person’s role with purpose. We help employees understand how their job is important to the overall success of the organisation. This is empowering and provides more meaning, even for jobs that often seem mundane to others. We hope it instils pride not only in the value of their role, but pride in the organisation, because we involve front-line employees in the effort to make improvements.

Changing culture

Sometimes it’s a surprise to people when they hear the city manager say their voice matters. That isn’t always the message they get from their supervisors or managers.

While front-line employees hear that a grass-roots improvement effort is encouraged, we also work to ensure the message flows from top management down through the ranks. We want to promote a culture of sharing responsibility for making positive changes. Throughout the rest of the day, we practice using a few, simple improvement tools like process mapping to better understand the current process and outcomes, root cause analysis to learn what really drives the issues we face, and Pareto charts that tell us where to first focus our improvement efforts.

At the end of the workshop, we encourage each individual to practice what they’ve learned by immediately making a small change or by participating in an improvement effort with a larger team

We use Deming’s bead-box game to teach employees how to spot waste in processes, and how to align their team or department output with the needs of their internal and external customers. At the end of the workshop, we encourage each individual to practice what they’ve learned by immediately making a small change or by participating in an improvement effort with a larger team.

Thanks to excellent support from our council, our city manager, and department heads, we are able to follow up on ideas from the workshop and other sources, and launch projects and rapid improvement events with teams comprised of volunteers from various departments who have been trained in one of our workshops.

An example from last year was a rapid improvement team we launched with members from our library, city manager’s office, and human resources that tackled improving the selection and acquisition of new materials in our libraries. They successfully implemented several changes in the span of about four days and rolled out other system changes over the following six months.

Spirit crushers

One exercise in our workshop focuses on listing phrases employees have heard that stopped an idea in its tracks.

It’s easy to crush innovation with a few words or an eye-roll

From, “That’ll never work!” to “It’s not your job to think”, it’s easy to crush innovation with a few words or an eye-roll. To manage the risk of having an idea rejected we teach people how to create a project charter and build a simple case for improvement before making their pitch. We strive to ensure people thoughtfully collaborate when identifying opportunities to improve rather than simply stuffing suggestion boxes with wish-lists that are promptly scoffed at and shredded.

This is also a way to mitigate the risk of project failure. For any project that extends beyond an employee and their immediate supervisor, we ask that a department head signs off on the charter before we put together a team.

Advice for managers

What we’ve found is that people just need to take one step.

If you’re a manager, I’d strongly encourage you to ask your team what they think could be done better and then help them make one small change. Don’t forget to share recognition for their efforts and they will likely develop an appetite for more.

For front-line staff

If you work on the front-line, before you go out and buy the latest book on Lean Six Sigma, I’d encourage you to try organising an area that is under your control. This could be your files, your desk, or even your physical workspace.

Make your own life a little easier and then show your supervisor what you did. In one step, you may start a movement. —Steven Pleasant

(Picture Credit: Unsplash)