Last week, a bit of a discussion occurred on the blog, in response to my post, "Raising Awareness of ROWE and Lean" I was happy to see all of the comments, and especially enjoyed the points of view from some those whose primary background is in Lean. While I still think there's a significant place within Lean for ROWE-based management styles, I also found the challenges to some of my assumptions to be quite thought-provoking. Clearly, this is not an idea that has reached its full maturity.
How well do you fail? Can you fail positively? Kind of interesting questions, aren’t they? Regardless of what you hear, organizations really don’t welcome failure. Many ignore it until it’s too late. Others seek out the guilty with a vengeance and fuel an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. A few actually see failure as an opportunity to improve. There are clear differences in how different organizations cope with failure. More importantly, there are big differences in how individuals and groups of people change as a result of failure. How you react and change when things go wrong is an important key...
If your analysis stops only at what activities took place, without an understanding of how people, organizations and people within organizations work, you will never correct the underlying problem. You have to look at the behavioral elements.
I have a dilemma. Since I have been blogging about ROWE and contemplating the virtual workspace, it is at odds with my affinity for Lean Thinking and, especially, the concepts of going to Gemba and Leader Standard Work. If process excellence is facilitated by having Leaders go to where the work takes place, how can this same process excellence be gained when workers are at home in their pajamas, banging away on laptops?
when does anyone start to examine how we do things, to look for inefficiency? If we eliminated that inefficiency, how many hours of unnecessary processing, running around to find things or people, sitting in pointless meetings, etc. etc. could be done away with?
Since I began blogging about ROWE a little while back, I’ve had a few emails from folks who have expressed that they have attempted to introduce ROWE in their own workplaces, only to find supervisors whose minds are closed to the concept (a situation I understand entirely). Typically, the supervisor / manager / business owner will state, even if he or she has bothered to become familiar with the concept is, “That will never work here.” The idea then is discarded, to wither and die on the slag heap of management indifference. Unfortunately, what these folks fail to realize,...
When it comes to change you have to worry about the people in the boat. Those who choose to stay in the water will either find their own raft, swim strongly, realize our boat is a pretty comfortable place or, sadly, they will drown. While we regret that, we must also remember that they have made their choices, and the outcomes are not our problem.
As I continue to contemplate the machinations of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), I've had a few conversations recently with people who are trying to understand how ROWE works. While I am far fom an expert, I have come up with a few things in order to share my understanding.
It's no wonder that those in power resist transparency or programs that put a spotlight on their knowledge base. By doing "what the boss wants" as a means of getting promoted, these folks never developed a strong enough knowledge base to fully understand the position. Of course, no one would want to put that on display. The end result is fear - fear, on the boss's part, that he or she will be exposed for having little to no knowledge of what in the hell it is their staffs do all day.
I had a post featured on shmula.com yesterday, once again examining the connection between Lean and ROWE. Here’s a snippet: To most workers, Lean initiatives (and other improvement efforts) suffer from a critical flaw – that you are supposed to engage in them only once you get to work. What isn’t addressed is that a lot of waste might come from just showing up. What if, instead of attendance, we focused only on the results? What if where you work was irrelevant as long as the work got done? What if meetings were optional, hours were idiosyncratic and people were...
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