Achieving HR Excellence through Six Sigma
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Achieving HR Excellence through Six Sigma

Daniel T. Bloom

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eBook - ePub

Achieving HR Excellence through Six Sigma

Daniel T. Bloom

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About This Book

Although world-class firms like GE and Motorola have relied on Six Sigma to build their performance cultures, these processes are all too often left out of human resources (HR) functions. This lack of Six Sigma principles is even more surprising because preventing errors and improving productivity are so critical to the people management processes of hiring, retention, appraisal, and development.

From the history and evolution of the Total Quality movement to initiatives for introducing a Six Sigma continuous process improvement strategy in your HR department, Achieving HR Excellence through Six Sigma, Second Edition introduces a new way to envision your role within the organization. It explains how this powerful methodology works and supplies a roadmap to help you find and eliminate waste in your HR processes.

Describing exactly what HR excellence means, the book outlines dozens of proven approaches as well as a hierarchy of the exact steps required to achieve it. It illustrates the Six Sigma methodology from the creation of a project to its successful completion. At each stage, it describes the specific tools currently available and provides examples of organizations that have used Six Sigma within HR to improve their organizations.

The text presents proven approaches that can help you solve and even eliminate people management problems altogether. Filled with real-world examples, it demonstrates how to implement Six Sigma into the transformational side of your organization. It also includes a listing of additional resources to help you along your Six Sigma journey.

Explaining how to build a new business model for your HR organization, the book supplies the new perspective and broad view you will need to discover and recommend game-changing alternatives to traditional HR approaches in your organization.

The first edition of this book was one of the first to demonstrate how HR professionals could enhance their careers by learning the language of business — it introduced the evolution of change management and the change management toolbox in a fashion that could easily be implemented in organizations.

This new edition updates the first with added information on some of the early history and introduces new case study tools resulting from the author's continuing work with organizations and in academic environments.

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Information

Year
2021
ISBN
9780429783173
Edition
2

Chapter 1 Organizational Excellence

The idea of excellence is in the eyes of the beholder. Have you ever watched the jaywalking segments on the Tonight show? I am not referring to the act of crossing the street in the middle of the block. I am referring to Jay Leno going out on the streets of Hollywood and asking everyday people a specific question on any number of topics. It is sufficient to say that some of the answers are in the range from correct to bizarre. Try a personal jaywalking type of experience in your personal lives. Ask the people you approach what the term excellence means to them. I guarantee that you will receive a wide variety of answers, as I said, excellence is in the eyes of the beholder. The responses will be guided by both internalized bias and cultural upbringing. Our ultimate goal is to reach as close to a state of perfection as possible.

Definition of Excellence

You have lived in this global environment, and as such your environment has generated certain feelings toward what is excellent and what is not. Your environment pressures you to answer the question in a particular way or fashion. These biases influence everything we do and say, from a personal perspective. Each person is going to have a concept in mind that defines excellence.
The business workplace is no different. In business, every organization is trying to reach that optimum performance level for its operations. Organizations seek the ability to say that they excel at what they do. The difficulty, however, is that the definition of excellence is elusive.
As support of what I am suggesting, open any web browser and google “definition of excellence”; the results will tell you the difficulty in arriving at a concrete definition. When I did a Google search of “definition of excellence” I got 328,000,000 results. When I change the search parameters to “defining excellence” the number of results drops to 110,000,000. The dilemma is that when confronted with this wide assortment, as individuals we have a hard time determining a single definition for excellence that satisfies everyone. One way to make that determination is to recognize that there are certain conditions that must be present for us to even begin to talk of excellence.
The website Vocabulary.com1 tells us several things about the definition of excellence. First, it tells us that it is not easy to achieve, and, second, it tells us that it is hard to define because it is rare to find it in the workplace. The essence of its definition is that excellence represents being the very best at what you do every day.
Consultant Robert Ferguson and his website Ferguson Values2 suggest that excellence is defined by doing well at what we do—that your organization believes in the quality of the products and services that you produce. They further state that excellence means trying to improve your processes all the time. It means that you are never complacent in the status of your organization, knowing and understanding that there is always a better way.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary,3 one of the oldest and most well-known dictionaries, defines excellence as a noun that shows an excellent or valuable quality; it also means setting a high standard. So, if we follow the logic from the dictionary, we begin to see that excellence means that we need to demonstrate that we are operating at a level that is perceived to be the best compared to our peers regarding what our responsibility levels are supposed to be.
Jeffrey Spear, president of Studio Spear, in an article for the American Marketing Association “Defining Excellence,”4 suggested that trying to reach this point of consensus is totally subjective, which adds to our difficulties in our endeavors. He also suggested that in a real sense excellence is something we have created to attach value to the things we create and validate our choices.
Consider another view of the term excellence. Reportedly if you visit the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, you will find engraved on the walls of one of the buildings the following definition of excellence written by an anonymous author.
EXCELLENCE is the result of
CARING more than others think wise
RISKING more than others think safe
DREAMING more than others think practical
EXPECTING more than others find possible
The quotation suggests that to reach the point of excellence we have to invest more of ourselves to reach the best in class to attain the indicated goal. The West Point definition suggests that excellence is a set of behaviors or actions that manifest themselves in the way that is perceived by those who influence us. It suggests that to achieve a state of excellence, we are required to change from the path of least resistance to more involvement in the outcomes. It means that we must move away from being purely transactional in essence to a more strategic mode. The changes are required both on an individual basis and on an organizational level. It further suggests that to achieve a state of excellence you have to be an active participant in the change process.
Peter Stark, President of Peter Barron Stark Consulting, in an article for the American Management Association, suggests that there are ten keys to workplace excellence:5 provide a compelling, positive vision with clear goals; communicate the right stuff at the right time; select the right people for the right job; create a united, team atmosphere; encourage cool stuff—continuous improvement and innovation; recognize and reward excellent performance; demand accountability; ensure that every employee learns and grows; deal with problems quickly and effectively; make sure each employee understands—it’s all about the customer.

Provide a Compelling, Positive Vision with Clear Goals

Neil Kokemuller suggests that
In an effective business, the role of management is clearly distinguished from that of front-line workers. Managers develop and communicate the overall purpose and structure of the company. Managers also build a collaborative company culture and team atmosphere that makes the line between management and employees closer.6
As I described in my book Employee Empowerment: The Prime Component of Sustainable Change Management (2020), the empowered manager provides these ultimate policies but in cooperation with the other parts of the organization. From our perspective an empowered organizational management/manager provides the organization and its human capital assets with a standard set of values, defined corporate goals, defined strategy, a defined mission and an underlying corporate culture. It is critical to our discussion that you have a clear picture as to what each means in your organization and your organizational alignment in support of the change.
Corporate Goals—Based on the corporate culture, mission statement and values the organization establishes a strategy to ensure that it is on the right path to meet customer expectations. Every organization establishes a set of specific targets which determine whether the organization stays on the right track. These targets have a specific time and place, and they are quantifiable, meaning that we have verifiable data to support them. The empowered manager understands these targets and how to disseminate them to the organization. The empowered manager understands that these targets are not just some artificial thought or concept but living embodiment of the organization. They are the life blood of the organization.
The importance of these goals is that in order for them to be viable they must meet certain criteria.
First, they must be aligned with the corporate mission, values strategy and culture. They must be not something that exists as a fad at the whim of some manager who heads the latest and best concept without consideration for the entire organization.
Second, your organizational goals must be compelling. Joe Vitale, the Spiritual Teacher, tells us that “our goals should scare you a little, and excite you a lot.”7 Your goals must tell the organization what is in it for them and why the time is right for the goals to be implemented.
Third, the goals must be clear in both their meaning and intent. They must be easily understood by the entire organization without requiring detailed explanations.

Communicate the Right Stuff at the Right Time

Excellence requires that when we communicate the changes, we need to keep in mind two critical factors. First, are we presenting these new goals in the correct format? Are these new goals presented as some new management fad, or are we truly communicating the reasoning behind the changes? The second aspect is the decision of when to communicate the move to excellence. Do we do it as everyone is leaving for the weekend, or do we do it through scheduled orientations to let everyone understand why we are undertaking the effort?

Select the Right People for the Right Job

As we will see later in this chapter, the end game is the creation of a center of excellence. In doing so we need to carefully ensure that the human capital assets that are assigned to coordinate the drive to excellence are those who can complete the effort. This is not the time to assign responsibilities because the individual is the boss’s favorite or the person is in a rut and needs a boost up. It is not the time to choose someone to lead the effort based on a manager’s biases or stereotypes about the abilities of certain people or groups to perform the responsibilities that are needed.

Create a United, Team Atmosphere

Excellence is a team sport. As we will see later, in the last chapter, one of the pillars of the road forward is to develop the corporate mantra centered around change and process improvement. Everyone from the ivory tower to the front office to the supply chain must buy into the effort. Of all process improvement efforts, 75 percent fail because not everyone is on board with the new normal. It is an atmosphere of that is my story and I am sticking to it.
The acquisition of excellence means that we all have to be on the same page. We all have to be onboard with the effort, why it is necessary and the direction that the organization as a whole has decided to go in. The excellent organization becomes the new normal.

Encourage Cool Stuff—Continuous Improvement and Innovation

As an organization you want an engaged workforce, if for no other reason than it makes the road to achieving excellence that much easier. Make the road fun. Encourage the use of diverse ideas and thinking beyond the box. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that something is a bad idea until you try the idea out. Ask yourself the question, “What if?” What does the problem look like if we tried to resolve it this way? Little changes are what create a winning change effort. As W. Edwards Deming told us, drive out the fear of trying. Celebrate the ideas generated by your subject matter experts on how to resolve the problems facing the organization.

Recognize and Reward Excellent Performance

Excellence means that we have to identify the organizational examples of excellence. It means that we need to identify those human capital assets or departments that are excelling at improving the organization.
The reward aspect does not have to be monetary. Several organizations have constructed whiteboards in the main lobby or in the break room where the successes of the organization can be portrayed for all to see. This effort can be a tool to enhance the organization’s buy-in to the improvement effort.

Demand Accountability

Organizational excellence is an organizational priority. No one regardless of their status in the organization can claim that a task on the road to excellence is not their job. Each and every individual within the organization is responsible for seeing that their part of the effort is carried out. If they are not, then management needs to train them to meet their responsibilities and then coach them on how to get to where they are supposed to be. If they can’t get there, then management needs to coach them on an exit strategy.

Ensure that Every Employee Learns and Grows

The ultimate goal of the empowered human capital assets is to work for a valued organization. To achieve this goal, they must understand how to get there. The process begins with explaining to the organization and its human capital assets what is in it for them in order to make the change to excellence. From there the process moves to the education of the organization.
The education part of the excellence equation involves explaining to the organization what the changes are and what the new normal expects on their behalf going forward—defining the performance expectations and outcomes of the introduction of the new process(es). Once everyone has been educated on the changes, the next step is to train them on the parts of the process that may not have caught on. With the education and training completed, there is inevitably going to be some human capital assets who just don’t get the message. From there excellence means you take those individuals and in a one-on-one coaching session work with them to identify where the problems exist. The coaching process also involves the establishment of an individual improvement plan to help them obtain the necessary skills.
If this does not work, then at some point a new coaching session takes place in which we sho...

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