Can Lean and Ergonomics improve Employee Engagement?

Lean and Ergonomics Systems are approaches to management and leadership that engages the ideas brought by all employees to help organizations optimize their work systems, learn faster and create more value. We can describe each in terms of a mindset and a set of practices.  Both mindsets view employees as valuable learners and contributors with emphasis on taking ownership and leadership by teaching and continuous problem solving. 

Both Lean and Ergonomics have practices that greatly benefit organizations.  Lean practices help organizations accelerate operations, remove waste, speed innovation, continuously improve performance, and help employees grow and develop. Ergonomics helps organizations accelerate operations, remove safety related risks, eliminate human errors, improve wellness, increase productivity and help employees grow and develop.  They produce the following systems:

1.      Organizational System: incorporating continuous improvement into the culture

2.      Operating System: providing real-time results and accelerated execution

3.      People System:  employee growth and development

4.      Work Evaluation System: continuous analysis of “how can we do this better?”

The Organizational System aspect of Lean and Ergonomics involves all employees learning together the fundamentals of each discipline and using that to continuously identify and solve problems that hinder the organization in fulfilling its goals, improving employee performance and delivering value to customers. The emphasis on relentless improvement means that there are always new challenges to be overcome.

The Operating System aspect of Lean and Ergonomics provides visibility and clarity in how work is conducted, where the bottlenecks are located and where risks (safety, quality) are present. Best practices involve and apply both from strategy deployment to daily execution.  Management and employees are involved in setting goals which then get prioritizes and assigned to those employees.  The ownership of these goals by employees will automatically deliver accountability and performance expectations throughout the organization. 

The People System aspect of Lean and Ergonomics makes certain ensures that management focuses on facilitating learning and individual growth for employees. In organizations that combine Lean and Ergonomics, managers function more like teachers than traditional superiors.  Individual employees should always be learning and exploring ways to improve their work—for the organization as a whole, their work team and individually.

The Work Evaluation System aspect of Lean and Ergonomics is directly related to the Organizational System in which employees are taught and expected to daily execute their acquired knowledge to continuously improve how the work gets done. 

So, with these reasons and others not mentioned, one would expect that organizations implementing Lean and Ergonomics would experience great improvement in employee engagement.  Not always.  In researching barriers to continuous improvement, I came across a common theme of barriers with the first one being rather surprising:  Employee Engagement!  (Number two was the need to foster collaboration among stakeholders).  Why is this?

I believe it comes down to the lack of adoption of the Lean and Ergonomics mindset by organizational leaders.  In many cases, when Lean and Ergonomics is implemented the employees are already somewhat or mostly disengaged so it may be difficult to get them engaged early on; however, this wouldn’t explain ongoing poor employee engagement. 

Over the years I’ve seen firsthand and heard of numerous reports of leaders who try to implement Lean and Ergonomics practices without themselves adopting the necessary and corresponding mindset and leadership behaviors.  They need to adopt and be comfortable with openly sharing information with employees and granting them more autonomy to make changes, unlike the traditional “command and control” leader behavior and practice.  In organizations whose leadership cannot make this mindset and behavior transition, the results of their Lean and Ergonomics effort will be limited and will hurt employee engagement.  Employees will tend to disengage instead of engage.  Lean and Ergonomics can and will improve employee engagement only if leaders are willing to address the barriers to engagement that stem from their own behaviors.