How gemba walks reduce manufacturing staff turnover

Gemba walks are a regular facet of the lean production system and help manufacturing employees perceive their bosses differently. For employee retention, employee perception can make all the difference. Getty Images

In 2019 no one in manufacturing could have predicted the U.S. would go from 3.5% unemployment in February 2020 to more than 30 million people claiming unemployment since March. Yet amid the pandemic, the reality of recruitment and retention struggles in manufacturing hasn’t changed too drastically.

Manufacturing demand is still high, and manufacturers are still hiring. So rising wages and talent wars, especially the fight to retain their most valuable people, continue. The need to retain your most experienced workers is still a top priority, especially if your new hires are inexperienced and require extensive training.

One employee retention strategy that has stood the test of time is the gemba walk. Gemba is a Japanese term that means “the actual place” and in manufacturing has been loosely translated to mean go and see “where the value is created.” It’s a structured walk through the plant with stops along the value stream to observe the process.

Gemba walks became a regular facet of the lean production system in the mid-1900s. They got company leaders out to the production floor, where the value was being created, to observe processes. Think of the 1980s “managing by wandering around” era, but instead of leaders randomly meandering through the facility, gemba walks are more structured and have problem-solving and employee engagement elements, which in turn lead to a culture of continuous improvement and employee satisfaction.

The Society for Human Resource Management—arguably the gold-standard association for surveys and trends related to employment issues—notes that having a bad manager has been consistently cited as one of the top reasons people leave their jobs. Good managers build relationships with employees at every level of the organization. They develop, mentor, and coach others and can detect problems as they occur and eliminate them quickly. The properly executed gemba walk is one among many tools good managers use, and it can be effective with or without a formal continuous improvement program.

That said, it’s important to conduct gemba walks the right way. The seven steps that follow can make a tangible difference. They break down something amorphous like “company culture” into steps you can follow to make a real difference in employee retention.

Instituting the Gemba Walk

1. Prepare the production team for the change. Your team needs to understand that you’re out there to observe processes, not people. Communicating your true intention is the key here, as you don’t want to create a “big brother is always watching” perception that could hurt employee morale.

2. Tap leaders and set ground rules. Gemba walks work best in teams. The key functional areas that should be represented include supply chain, engineering, maintenance, operations, human resources, and safety. Explain that gemba walks are not optional and that the team walks together.

3. Plan your route. Start at the end of the value stream and work your way up. You might uncover a problem downstream at a secondary operation, but the most effective corrective action might need to occur upstream. When you reach that upstream process, you can address the problem.

4. Vary the route and the time of day. When you vary your route and time, you’ll see more processes and be able to talk with different operators.

5. Create metrics at each key area you’d like to address. Create no more than three or four metrics. Have something at the workstation to record discovered problems, including what the issue is, when it occurred, and who should be involved to develop corrective action. Review problems, but do not try to solve them during the gemba. The team should spend no more than five minutes at each station.

One of the best tools to use for gemba walk metrics is something called an MDI board. MDI stands for managing for daily improvement, but you can certainly put your own spin on it and call it whatever you’d like. Color-coded for clarity, an MDI board consists of one column dedicated to the issue being addressed next to adjacent columns dedicated to topics like safety, quality, delivery, and cost. A final column could have your hour-by-hour tracker for production if needed, or you could post announcements or other company information.

During their walk, the gemba team stands around the MDI board and the area leader summarizes the metrics—quickly. In fact, some of the best MDI boards abide by the five by five rule: Standing 5 ft. away from the board, you should know whether you’re winning or losing within 5 seconds. That’s it. There’s no need for someone to spend hours on detailed pie charts or other graphics that nobody will look at.

6. Follow up. Nothing derails employee engagement and the flow of ideas faster than a lack of follow-up. Follow up every idea, even if it’s something you don’t wish to pursue. Employees will respect that and potentially devise an even better solution. In some cases, an employee might have an idea that’s quick to implement and will help improve the area immediately. In those cases, empower your employees to “just do it.” If you want to see employees engaged, give them the chance to carry out their own ideas for improvement.

7. Adjust as necessary. The frequency, the routes, the times—these will all change the more gemba walks you do and the more you understand where the issues are. In most cases, there’s no need to change your gemba walk every week, but it shouldn’t stay the same forever either. The gemba walk should evolve with your operation. You may begin by stopping at your largest bottleneck station every day. As your team makes and sustains improvements, your bottleneck will move. At that point you might stop at the original bottleneck area only three times per week. Communicate the new route and schedule, but don’t go overboard on how often they change.

A Gemba Story

Imagine you land a job as the new CEO of a $25 million custom metal fabricator with high staff turnover. Its reputation is suffering and it’s losing money. Your managers, especially those in HR, are already stressed from the turnover, and now you’re facing the possibility of losing some of your largest customers because of quality problems.

Customer demands are well within market norms, so what’s the problem? You could blame operator error, a messy shop, inefficient processes, poor maintenance practices, or a lack of process documentation and training—but these aren’t the root causes. The dominant root cause can be traced back to one thing: a strict top-down management style that basically dictates everything that employees do. Now mind you, you cannot change a culture quickly. It’s akin to turning around a battleship; it’s doable, but it takes time.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And in this case, that first bite involves management coaching and, not least, the gemba walk. You take your first walk with the operations director, who walks with you down a long, wide aisle with machines on either side. You see flotsam everywhere, even customer prints lying on the floor in some places.

When you approach the first obvious debris in the aisle, you stop and pick it up. The operations director gives you a strange look. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “That stuff is all over the place. Someone on third shift goes around at night and cleans this up.”

Whatever you ignore will be unimportant to employees who look to you for leadership. You might ignore the small stuff—like debris on the shop floor—but the small stuff can eventually ripple outward to everything else that happens in the operation. Regardless, if the operators are not concerned with keeping their areas clean and safe, and the company leadership does not seem concerned with improving these areas, quality and safety will surely suffer.

Note that all this isn’t at all like the top-down management style that has plagued the company for years. Top-down management proliferates when chaos reigns. Managers engage with their teams only when something goes awry. They never really talk with front-line employees; they instead talk at them to tell them what they did wrong.

On the contrary, picking up debris during a gemba walk gets people thinking about the work environment, which in turn sets the foundation for process improvement. The better the process, the less firefighting you have, and the less chance there is for a strict top-down management style to spread. And in this case (as in many others), it all starts with basic improvements in safety and housekeeping.

A week later you gather six members of your leadership team and walk the same aisle. The ops director stops to pick up a broken piece of a pallet that was lying in the middle of the floor. He begins to set an example. Within the next few weeks, you can see the place really starting to look much cleaner and safer.

When you speak with operators during the weeks that follow, you begin to see how they’re taking pride in their work areas and noting safety and housekeeping issues without fear of reproach. Your ops director is also proud of how rapidly his team is improving.

Employees become open to discussing things like safety and housekeeping, which in turn leads them to being more open about how to improve the processes they work every day. In the past nobody had bothered to ask them about how their jobs could be improved, so they continued to do things the way they were told to do them. Now that’s starting to change.

The transformation is incredible to watch. Even after years of poor management tactics, the operations director is able to drive a variety of improvements and gain the trust of the workforce. That’s what happens when management buys in and embraces improvement.

This sets the tone for other improvements made during the ensuing years. Turnover plummets, profits improve, the OSHA incident rate drops dramatically, scrap is reduced, and on-time delivery reaches world-class levels. As you can probably guess, this is all based on a true story—and it all started by picking up a piece of debris on a gemba walk.

Changing Employee Perceptions

Amid the pandemic, social distancing is a priority, and following public health recommendations can help ensure you conduct gemba walks safely. It could be argued that gemba walks are more important now than ever. If those on a walk see an assembly operation requiring operators to stand close together, they can start to do something about it.

All this helps change how employees perceive their managers. In fact, changing perception can have a bigger impact on employee retention than benefits or pay. Keeping your experienced team not only improves productivity and increases revenue but also saves money. The average cost to recruit, hire, and train a new manufacturing employee is more than $7,000—and this doesn’t even take into account the work slowdown that occurs during the hiring and training process.

Would you rather work for a manager who incorporates a gemba walk into his or her daily routine, or someone you rarely see unless you do something wrong? The former builds a culture of improvement while the latter creates an environment where everyone keeps their heads down and mouths shut as they dream of finding another job.

Joseph Girard is a consulting services manager at Wipfli LLC.