COVID Compliant Business Part 4: Communication and Collaboration

COVID Compliant Business Part 4: Communication and Collaboration

stand up meeting visual management

So this is the final part of the COVID Compliant Business discussion. It’s time to look at the importance of communicating and collaborating with your team.

 

Employee engagement and employee buy-in at this time are critical to your success

There is no way, as a business owner or a business or department manager, that you can set and maintain standards around COVID-19; physical distancing, hygiene, visitors, cleaning- the whole lot, on your own. It’s just not possible. One of the things to acknowledge, that is really important if you want a team that drives the achievement of goals in this space, and this is more generally a discussion about visual management as well, is that you need to have daily team meetings- socially distanced of course- to discuss and drive these actions forward.

 

visual management board

 

The key to a good daily team meeting is for it to be held face to face, standing around your Visual Performance Centre, looking at the metrics

These meetings should be focused roughly 50% on visualising and communicating around what’s going on in the business, and 50% around problem-solving. If we look at it from this point of view, we can visualise things like cleaning rosters, audits for cleanliness and layout. We can have a safety cross that we colour in every day to question and highlight- “Did we have a safe day yesterday?” Those kinds of things can be visualised on a board, or on bits of paper coloured in by hand by the team.

These discussions should take place on a daily basis, and you’re looking for the metrics to be green. This tells us we’ve had a successful day; the layout, the 5S, or the cleaning roster has complied in an audit, and we’ve coloured a green. An example of this playing out would be if you’re seeing red on your Visual Performance Centre. An opportunity to problem-solve is identified- “Okay! We have a red day on the audit for the 5S of the factory floor. Let’s go out and see what’s going on!” And we need to fix that problem. ASAP. So, you’re addressing red on the metrics by communicating and collaborating with the team, allowing you to divide up and delegate the identified issues and get them fixed quickly. This is definitely an action-oriented time in terms of keeping people safe, ensuring our business has the right to operate, not shut down because of COVID concerns.

 

stand up meeting visual performance

 

So visualise and communicate with your team on a daily basis around performance relating to COVID compliance

This way you are going to have a much more ‘bought-in’ workforce who want the same things as you; they want jobs, they want to continue working, they don’t want to have an outbreak shutting down your operation. This kind of collaboration is as important to them as it is to you. And you can share the workload. Your team will feel like they’re part of a greater effort to make sure that the business continues safely and effectively.

 

If you want to see what else we talked about relating to being COVID ready, using Lean and Kaizen approaches, then, by all means, take a look at Parts One through Four of this series of blogs.  I hope you enjoy!

 

Reach out if you want to know more about how to create a culture of continuous environment in your workplace.

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Book a discussion to find out how we can help your business.

 

Respect,

Daniel.

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