Get in front of the resistance

You’ve traveled on your lean journey for several months or several years. You’ve launched various initiatives; some have been wins, some you’d call a draw. Some people embrace process improvement; others bide their time and wait for it to pass. So go the typical results for manufacturing companies that dive into continuous improvement.

Another typical result: resistance to change. How you address the resistance will affect how quickly you achieve results and how well you sustain them.

Why Do People Resist Change?

Your lean journey is all about change for the good. Improvements should lead to better performance for your customers, a safer work environment for your employees, and simpler processes for everyone. Such improvements also threaten your competition because your company becomes a force to be reckoned with. If these points are true, why would you and others at your company possibly resist change?

Imagine you’re a welder or a production manager in your company, and along comes some sort of change to a familiar process. If you don’t know why change is happening, then you’ll probably resist it. We do not like surprises.

You need to get in front of the change. Make the business case to management and explain why the change is occurring to the people working directly in the affected processes. Do this and you can head off most of the resistance.

Even after this, you’ll probably find people who feel really comfortable with the current state and see no need to change. Any change is simply going to upset their world, or at least the workplace where they spend most of their day. We all get comfortable. It takes some effort to break through the comfort zone and help people understand why the change is good for them, beneficial to the customer, and necessary to stay competitive.

Employees might remember past changes as being disruptive, negative experiences. Perhaps they thought the changes were heavy-handed. Maybe something was promised that did not come true, or they simply had the impression that the change happened “to them” instead of “with them.” Their views might or might not be valid, but the effects of those past changes linger all the same. When you view things from their perspective, you can see where the resistance comes from.

Overcome the Resistance

Sources of resistance usually are within your control. You can anticipate them, minimize their impact, and take tangible actions. All this incorporates some fundamental aspects of change management. Ignore change management and you run the risk of negative reaction, pushback, and ongoing problems that really do not need to occur.

Change management addresses the soft side of process improvement. Are people genuinely involved in change? Do you listen to their ideas, particularly when it directly affects their workspace? Do you anticipate how people might react to new ideas and processes? Put another way, have you walked in their shoes? Change management provides the structure needed to answer these and similar questions.

Anticipating resistance is much more effective than reacting to it. The former allows you to avoid disruption rather than having to clean up after the resistance has occurred.

How can you anticipate resistance? Failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) is one approach. FMEA results in a quantified assessment of potential reactions and their relative priorities such that there is logic about what you work on first to address resistance.

That’s a complex approach. A simpler one is to role-play the change and respond to several different expected reactions. You can even role-play with those who will be directly impacted by the change.

The simplest overall approach is to involve people in the change. Do it with them, not to them. With such involvement comes deeper understanding, better buy-in, and genuine advocates for the change to be successful and sustainable. Regardless of your level or job in the manufacturing organization, wouldn’t you prefer to be involved in a meaningful and fulfilling way?

Examples of Resistance

Think of specific situations where people resisted change—be it in the shop, the office, even with customers or suppliers—and it will bring to life the importance of addressing that resistance.

When practicing lean concepts, you’ll undoubtedly begin to pay attention to performance metrics. These shed light on the process. Once root cause analysis and problem-solving have been done with participation and input from the employees involved, improvement can be made.

During all this, you’ll start measuring things. After all, if you don’t measure something, you can’t improve it. But be aware of how people react to being measured. If they feel you are measuring the “person,” you’ll likely get more pushback than if they think you’re measuring the “process.” This might be a subtle point for you, but it’s a huge point to the person actually doing the process … particularly if the performance of that process is poor. Introduce performance metrics as a way to learn about and improve the process, not as a way to isolate and pick on employees. This will help get you in front of the resistance before it occurs.

Suppose you’ve made improvements to the work flow in welding. Previously you ran the initial assembly weld and the final weld operations in batches. Now you have one-piece flow, or at least maintain a minimal batch size to account for cool-down time between operations.

The welders see this as a radical change. They were comfortable with the old flow and batch sizes because the work-in-process inventory tended to make each welding cell an independent station where they could work at their own pace. The new flow links the operations and makes them more dependent on each other.

Welders also discover that the overall work status is far more visible to supervisors and peers. From a manager’s perspective, this allows people to catch hang-ups before they snowball into larger problems. The welders see things differently, and it goes back to that feeling of independence.

Previously welders came to work, looked at the schedule, and decided what to work on next. It was as if their welding cells were their own “weld shops.” They chose the sequence of jobs and worked hard to send all the work they could to the next operation. If they made a mistake, they would fix it on their own and move on—and no one noticed.

Moreover, what the next operation did with the work wasn’t their problem. They didn’t have to worry how others performed. Considering all this, no wonder the welders resist change. The new part flow seemingly destroys what they like most about their job.

Before even thinking about implementing change, put yourself in the welders’ shoes. Welders might like autonomy, but they also like efficiency, and they don’t like wasting time. Batch processing is extraordinarily inefficient, and it makes life difficult for everyone. Welders leave their workstations to go on daily part hunts. They work late and miss time with their families. Assemblers search for parts too, and production managers run to clear bottlenecks. It’s not them. It’s the process. And with their help, the process can be made much, much better.

Consider another situation involving standard work. It’s a common tool in the lean toolbox, but it’s not intended to box in or limit someone. Rather, it is a way to have a defined, consistently used process, eliminating or minimizing variation and non-value-added work. Standard work empowers employees to resolve problems quickly, because there is only one way the work is done. You don’t have to investigate each person’s unique process to find the root cause.

Say you go to the employee’s workstation, lay the new standard-work document down, and say, “Here is the way you do this work from now on.” You should expect some resistance.

What you intend and what the employee sees and hears might be two wildly different things. You intend to provide a way to make the work better, and the employee sees the standard work as a punishment and creativity dampener. Again, you should get in front of the resistance so that your employees accept the lean improvements for what they are: ways to make everyone more competitive and successful.

Learn From the Resistance

Changes you make on your lean journey—rearranged flow, repositioning of tools through 5S, more effective parts presentation, one-piece flow instead of batching, and on it goes—are logical, effective, and simply make lots of sense. But the best technical changes can be undermined if you do not pay attention to the soft side of change—that is, the people.

People resist because the changes haven’t been managed. In many cases, the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of resistance are self-inflicted. By applying the ideas we have explored here, you can get in front of the resistance. The better you do this, the more success you’ll have on your lean journey.

Jeff Sipes is principal of Back2Basics LLC, 317-439-7960, www.back2basics-lean.com. If you have improvement ideas you’d like to read about, email him at jwsipes@back2basics-lean.com or Senior Editor Tim Heston at timh@thefabricator.com.