Lean Production and Its Influence

Lean Production and Its Influence on Employee Stress

The growth of high efficiency production techniques including lean manufacturing in conjunction with the increasing strength and use of analytical tools, techniques and approaches to tracking employee and departmental performance data has created significant stress for workers throughout global manufacturing and service organizations. This has been exacerbated by management teams who in many cases lack emotional intelligence (EI) and the ability to create an environment of transformational leadership in their organizations. These two components, EI and transformational leadership, can lessen the impact of the stress of lean manufacturing and production techniques on workers, yet much of the research in this area shows it is the exception rather than the rule.

What further makes lean production processes stressful for workers are the following factors.

First, there is often a lack of ownership at the C-Level for forcing change to existing processes and making them consistent enough to be managed efficiently. What is consistent across much of the research into the stresses caused by lean manufacturing initiatives is that many times C-level executives fail to support them fully, adding in one more set of tasks, often not consistent with a person's existing job, to their set of responsibilities. Confusion and a sense of futility often result, as workers struggle to figure out what to accomplish first. This is common in organizations that force lean production techniques for the sake of cost reduction yet are not fully committed to completely changing the organization and making it more effective at the individual contributor level.

Second, lean production techniques and the accompanying series of metrics of performance bring undue stress on many workers as their organizations look to quantify their contributions. As analytics software applications become increasingly commonplace, the use of dashboards to measure everything from the time it takes to create a new document, close a call in a call center, or create a new customer record all become metrics that end up on dashboards. This approach to over-measuring performance just because there are tools to accomplish this are also forcing stress levels up in many organizations.

Third, many organizations aggressively promote the concept of lean manufacturing as a strategy for higher productivity yet in the end only use it for cost reduction. This is also a critical mistake many manufacturers make, and often becomes the main focus these companies continue to pursue as opportunities to grow through better use of their employees pass them by. Lean manufacturing and production as a strategy for cost reduction, no matter how it is presented, causes major stress for workers.

Fourth, the lack support from cross-department leaders and the continued siloing of critical information resources despite the company-wide voiced support for lean production also causes major stress. When lean production initiatives and strategies are put into place often workers are forced to substantiate and fight for their jobs, as cost reductions and layoffs are for some companies the benefits they seek from these strategies.

Fifth, the pressure from the many requirements for compliance in conjunction with adoption of lean manufacturing techniques also is making a significantly higher level of stress in many organizations than has otherwise been the case. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) is the impetus for many organizations to fully adopt lean production techniques and drive dozens of metrics and measures of performance to the job level. Compliance is forcing many companies to adopt a very aggressive approach to monitoring employee's activities from a financial standpoint.

Sixth, the influence of lean production on employee's privacy is also becoming a critical issue. The role of electronic monitoring for the sake of benchmarking performance and reporting back time and costs savings due to lean production strategies is becoming pervasive.

In summary, there are many stressors at work in organizations that choose to adopt and pursue lean production techniques. Foremost of these is the shrinking of individual jobs to tasks that can be quantified, studied for improvement, eventually consolidated and then re-shaped into standardized procedures that can be sent anywhere in the world. The push to measuring performance and results is being driven by the broad range of analytical applications available on the market today as well. All these forces are combining to drive workers to higher levels of stress than ever before, while at the same time making their work habits, personal habits and approach to doing their jobs more recordable, quantified, and examined than ever before. Clearly what is needed is a strong set of strategies for alleviating stress of lean production through more effective management strategies that take into account the rapid shift to globalization and the relentless pursuit of lower cost per labor hour.

Strategies for Alleviating Stress in Lean Production Environments

First, there is the critical issue of job ownership. In lean production environments this is typically the first causality of a worker's job. What needs to happen however the time is and cost savings from lean production need to be used to allow workers to have greater freedom in defining their jobs and how they manage them.

This concept of ownership is well highlighted in the many research efforts of Alstyne, Brynjolfsson and Madnick from MIT who in several research papers and results report the importance of fostering and promoting ownership of tasks through transformational leadership. In their study of the correlation of task and team ownership in lean production and system implementations, Alstyne, Brynjolfsson and Madnick (1997) comment that "The very act of decentralizing decision-making - asking workers for their values and then taking them seriously - can have a positive effect on the change process by giving employees a sense of ownership and responsibility," and from previous work show the impact of theories of ownership on change management with this insight from their work Alstyne, Brynjolfsson and Madnick (1995): "Theories of ownership, for example, suggest that decentralizing the use of data and decisions can boost quality levels in systems users control themselves."

Second, lean production forces workers together from widely divergent cultures, creating a very high level of stress, and even conflict over time. When one considers the efforts of a young, brash manager for Schindler Corporation attempting to bring together his company's culture with that of India, all the while forcing lean production standards on his Indian workers, the conflicts immediately became apparent. In the Harvard Business Review case study, Silvio Napoli at Schindler India (a) (2003), the trials and tribulations of a manager who is intent on pushing his own culture of lean production excellence onto his Indian workers. Mr. Napoli is told that he must be "part monk and part warrior" by his senior management when approaching the defining of Indian production centers (4) Silvio Napoli at Schindler India (a) (2003) yet he doggedly pushes for exceptionally high and unrealistic standards of performance for the Indian workers, many of which don't even know what lean production is. As a result Mr. Napoli experiences culture shock, as does his family, and also faces the challenges of creating a supply chain, implementing a complex lean production process to sell elevators in India. The result is that Schindler Corporation fails to attain its objectives primarily because Mr. Napoli fails to see how lean production initiatives and the lack of ownership surrounding tasks make the role of Indian sales, engineering and service personnel nearly impossible to complete.

The cultural distances when it comes to implementing lean production and the resulting cultural distances between workers and the exacerbating effects on a company's competitive landscape are defined by Porter in Competitive Advantage of Nations (34). Applying Porters' analytical constructs to the issues Mr. Napoli faces in becoming more effective with lean production strategies, one of the greatest stumbling blocks is the fact that Napoli has no sense of how his lean production strategies are impacting the perceptions of Indian employees and customers. Napoli sees lean production as the main goal, not integration of his operating philosophies or even the attitudes of workers. It is literally his way or the highway and the lack of focus on integrating culturally in this specific case shows the pervasive nature of lean production blinding executives from the total picture of managing teams.

For Napoli and other leaders who focus only on lean production at the expense of creating a highly collaborative team environment, the tension between their teams and others throughout the organization also escalates. According to Susman & Dean (1992) one of the major reasons for ongoing conflicts between teams in lean production is the lack of clarity on key metrics of lean performance and the highly process-centric nature of manufacturing's transformation. This lack of clarity surrounding the goals, metrics, performance and expectations of lean production form the basis of this further disconnect with this manufacturing strategy.