The Principals of Six Sigma Methodology and how it can help your Business- Creating Change Agents

           There are many different aspects in build into an employee and leader. You need to teach them the basic knowledge of their job, the company and industry they work in, and the skills to succeed in the company. One issue I find with businesses is that they train and build education for their employees on the position they are currently in, not the position they want to be in! One aspect of this is creating what we call in Six Sigma a change agent. A change agent is someone who learns skills to advance in a company. These people truly believe in the company they work for and want to help the business succeed in any position they are in. Creating a change agent environment can dramatically improve production, lower turnover, and increase company moral. 

                Change agent versus a victim. Have you ever had an employee who always blames someone or something else? It is never the employees fault they were late, it was the traffic. It was not their fault the report was late, the printer did not work. It was not their fault the presentation was not complete, it was other team members. Sound familiar! We refer to these people as victims. These people will not take responsibility for their mistakes or errors and instead find a way to blame anything else. By not accepting responsibility, they do not grow as a person or employee! The first thing to create a better environment is to get rid of the attitude of having victims. 

                Going back to the same examples above, a change agent approaches mistakes as opportunities as opposed to pointing blame. They were late because they did not leave early enough. The report was late because they waited until last minute to try and print it. The presentation was not complete because they did not contact other members to check status and identify delays. You have the same results in that a mistake was made. The difference in these situations is that the change agent can now take this experience and learn from it to avoid it from happening in the future. They now know that traffic may cause a ten minute delay, so they should leave a little sooner. They should organize their time to make sure they get their report done sooner so if an issue comes up with the printer they have time to find an alternative solution. To prevent the presentation from being late they will now set reminders to check in with team members at the end of the day to see how things are going.

                Creating an environment like this is not easy. It is much easier for someone to point blame then take responsibility for mistakes.  The first step in this is to create a change agent culture. It is important to know the cultures attitude should be non-blaming and non-judgmental.  If an employee makes a mistake, it should be seen as an opportunity to teach everyone about it, but do it in a positive approach. Doing not criticize or make it seem like more of an issue then it is. It is important to teach employees that mistakes are made and to make sure they see mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow. In life, as well as business, 10% is what happens to us, 90% is how we react to it. Having a negative or blaming attitude causes a negative workplace. A Positive reaction or attitude creates a positive and growing environment.

It is also important that every level of the company can make mistakes. If management makes a mistake, it is important to tell employees and not hide it. Hiding it will just lower overall trust and faith of the management team. Once employees do not trust or believe in their management, it creates a negative environment and limits growth and the ability to manage employees. Think of it this way, if your boss does something wrong and hides it instead of admitting it, will you still trust their judgment on issues? Or even worse, if your boss blames the issue on his team (you) for something that he mismanaged, you may lose all faith in them after that. Another important point is to make sure the employee feels they are part of the company. Let them know their concerns and ideas are important to hear by management. You never know what sort of ideas are out there that may actually help the company!

So how does a company start to develop this culture? Growing this culture and philosophy is a complex mixture of balance and support. Create groups that focus on this within your company. Have employees create a committee that focuses on new ways to increase positivity. Generate newsletters, town halls, team meetings, and memos focused on this concept. Teams must support each member by sharing responsibility and for teams to succeed; members must have an environment to grow. You can apply these skills by creating fun and new ways to interact with your employees. It is important to find ways so that if an employee does a good job they are recognized by management and peers. Employee of the month, recognition emails, and rewards for change are just a few ways to promote this. Encourage employees to give recognition when it is due. A “pay it forward” approach is a great way to spread the attitude. Have employees send recognition emails when they feel it is necessary. The employee receives it and gets a feeling of accomplishment and think of a few people that they can send cards to. This is a great way to increase employee satisfaction and reward employees for their good work. Sometimes all it takes is a thank you to feel valuable to a company. One of the most powerful things I know in existence is a kind word and a thoughtful gesture.

Mistakes will be mad. When they are, coaching needs to be done to the employee that creates the issue. It is important to do a pro active approach. Instead of “attacking” them and pointing blame, do a five W approach. Why did this happen? Why did you do it that way? Why did you not ask for help? Why do you think this happened? The questions should vary issue to issue and be formed as the meeting occurs. 

Example:

Question 1- Why did you miss the deadline?

Answer- I forgot it was due today.

Question 2- Why did you forget the deadline date?

Answer- I forgot to put it on my calendar.

Question 3- What do you think would have prevented this issue from happening?

Answer- Setting a reminder and putting it on my calendar.

Question 4- What do you think happened by you missing the deadline and how did it effect the company?

Answer- Since I missed the deadline we missed a deadline for a client lowering the overall customer satisfaction.

Question 5- What will you do differently next time?

Answer- I will make sure that I put items on my calendar as I receive them to prevent any issue in me forgetting.

This simple meeting helps identify the issue, the impact, and the resolution without pointing direct blame. It is important that the setting is not tense or uncomfortable. The employee should know they did something wrong, but be relaxed and not worry that serious consequences may occur (unless it warrants that). It is important to also train management in re-directing the conversation if it starts to go down the “victim lane”. If the employee starts to point blame at anyone or anything, the manager needs to re-direct it back.

Once you get people to accept the change agent attitude, you will see it snowball. The feeling of accomplishment and making a change to a company is contagious and can permanently change the attitude of employees.  By doing this it can help grow and improve a company 1/10^th of a company every day everyday during the 250 work days per year that is 25% improvement per year with a simple philosophy change. This is much better than trying to set up a campaign to get improved results in a one shot initiative in a month to get 10% improvement. Generally these campaigns are short term and require a lot of time and energy.  This reminds me of two phrases I have heard. One being:  “how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time”.  This understanding is that no matter how big the problem, do not try to take it all on at once. Go at it slowly. The other: “What is the difference between poop and fertilizer? They are essentially the same thing but poop is just a form of waste. Fertilizer is the basic component to grow a large, beautiful environment.”

5 Factors when determining your companies demographic

                This is a common question: “why narrow your marketing to a select group of people?” The answer is both simple and complicated. Simple first, because only certain people want your product! Ok, and now the more complex. Marketing costs money! Even free advertising is not free! Think about it, you are taking time out of your valuable day to do some free marketing online. That is time you could be doing something that can make you money. Once you know how much your advertisement really is costing you, the next thing you want to know is what you are getting back from your marketing. This is considered your return on investment (ROI). If you send out 5,000 fliers but only had 5 customers from those, which is not a good marketing campaign. So what can you do to get more customers by sending out the same amount of fliers? Determine a better demographic to advertise to! Here are five things to really think about when narrowing a demographic:

Age- What age group does your product fall into? Is it a product that is meant more for elderly people, or a younger group? Think about this, your company has a product to help reduce wrinkles. What would be a good group to target? You can narrow this slowly by removing the obvious choices first. We can remove newborn to 18. Kids do not need wrinkle medicine. We can cut the high age as well so let’s remove 55+. If you research this industry you will notice a large drop in consumers at the higher ages as well, why? After a certain age people begin to care less about their appearance when it becomes the norm for their age group and accept it. So based on this, you can see we are at 18-55. Rule of thumb is to narrow to 5% population. We will get to this more later.

Sex- Is your product aimed for a certain sex? Can it only be used by men or women? Going back to the wrinkle cream, most men do not use cosmetic products. So this is a simple one. We would only gear it towards female! Most products have a favor towards one sex or the other. Many unisex products fail because by catering both males and females, it generally becomes a product no one wants! 

Ethnicity- Is your product used more by a certain ethnicity? Will your product offend any specific ethnicity? I first want to say you should never have a product that purposely segregates or offends ANYONE. Not only is it something that will bring bad publicity, but it is just morally wrong. This is not always a big factor to look into, but it can be used in some products. Let’s once again look at our wrinkle cream example. This is a factor we would not really put much importance on. This product is used by all ethnic groups so you would want to market to them all.  

Religion- Is your product geared towards a specific religion or has any aspects of religion involved in it? This is again one that is not always a factor that needs to be used, and again this is one where you should never have a product that is meant to offend or segregate a religion. With our example of wrinkle cream we would probably not use this factor as people of all religions can use it. This factor is sometimes hard to understand when we would use it so here are a couple examples. Is your product spiritual in the fact that it involves doing certain rituals that is not looked at positively by some religions? Meditation products, alternative medicine, jewelry with certain religious emblems are all things that you may be able to narrow it down to a certain group. If you can narrow this section down you can look into advertising in venues with religious groups such as church functions, faith based websites, or networking with religious groups.   

Location- Is your product meant in certain regions? Are you marketing locally only or nationally? Location is very important for so many reasons. You do not want to sell things that cannot be used in certain areas. You would not market surfboards in Arizona! You also wouldn’t market snow shovels in San Diego! You also want to look at other aspects in location as well. Let’s continue with wrinkle cream. Say your product is at the higher end of the price range. It is also cosmetic and not a necessity. These two points play a big factor in where you want to market it. You want to aim for cities and states with high populations of your other factors we discussed that have higher income levels and, if you can find it, where more people use similar products. So when you think of high end cosmetic products where do you think of first? How about Los Angeles, New York, or Miami? These are all major cities with high incomes and are generally big on appearance. Not to sound mean, these are big cities with major influence in the fashion industry. 

Now that you have a group of people narrowed down, you then want to make sure it is specific enough or make sure it is not too specific. Again, general rule is 5% total population. Now target your next marketing campaign towards these people. Ways to actually do the marketing will be discussed in a later publication. It is always good to go back and analyze a marketing campaign when it is done. Did your ROI increase? Where there more people in one area of your demographic buying your product more than others? Do you think you may have left a group of people out? If you find any opportunities during your analysis, adjust them for your next campaign. Even after you found your market, you should continue to analyze in case a shift changed. This is why it is a good idea to get a marketing consultant or hire a marketing firm. Half the challenge is determining your market and how to get to that market the best.

The Principals of Six Sigma Methodology and how it can help your Business- Defining DMAIC

Six Sigma has really evolved into being a tool that can be used in all industries. The tools are universal for each business. Over the last 25 years Six Sigma has evolved into one of the leading management methodologies and has been adopted by most Fortune 500 companies. Six sigma specializes in removing wasteful process steps and setting up quality methods to ensure everything is running as efficiently as possible and to also help catch processes that can be improved on.

The primary methodology that is taught in Six Sigma is called DMAIC. This stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.  This is the method in which most six sigma projects are run. In the define stage the six sigma team will determine what the issue they are wanting to address actually is. Measure is the stage where the team gathers the details and data to better review the problem. Analyze is the stage when the team reviews the data they collected from the measure stage. After they analyze the data they move into the next stage, improve, where they design and implement process changes to help solve for the issue. Control is the final phase where quality processes are added to ensure that the changes made are helping to solve for the problem. If in the control stage they are finding that the issue is still there they may decide to go back to one of the previous steps and go back through to find another solution.

It is easy to understand the ideas behind the steps, but harder to actually understand how to actually implement them. Here is one simple example of DMAIC:

Using DMAIC in the hotel industry:

·         Define- Say you want to improve customer service but you are not sure how. In the define stage you will review your current processes to see what all impacts customer service. So for example you can look at your room service processes, your front desk processes to sign people in and out, or your housekeeping services. You then find out which area needs the most help. There are many tools in six sigma to determine this; these will be discussed in a later blog. 

·         Measure- So we have narrowed our list down and found that we want to work on our room service. You will want to analyze all the different aspects of customer service and use different resources. Some things you may want to look at is quality of service (how the employee interacted with your customer), the speed of the service, or the presentation of the service. 

·          Analyze- In the analyze stage you will look at the data you gathered and determine where the issues may be. So form the last stage we may have timed the speed of the service and determined that it was taking longer than 30 minutes to bring them their requests. We also did surveys in the last stage to gauge the overall customer satisfaction of the customers and determined they wanted the service done within 20 minutes. This gives us one thing that we will want to look into to change since we can see we are failing our customer expectation.

·         Improve- Now that we have our issue, let’s fix it. In analyze we not only realized that our turnaround time was not fast enough to meet the customer’s needs, we also found out that there was a time lapse from when the customer dialed the number to room service, until the request was given to the employees who prepared and delivered the request. This lapse on average was nearly 15 minutes. So to fix this, in the improve stage we implement new processes where the customer service call is typed into a database by the receptionist who answers the call. This database feeds directly to the back where the requests are handled removing the call to them which was originally how it was done. This eliminates the step that took wasteful time.

·         Control- So now we have eliminated steps that were not only taking up extra time from the employees, but also improved the speed of customer service which resulted in higher customer satisfaction. The hotel has decided to make sure this new change will continue, they built in a reporting database to track the calls and time it takes to answer. They also decided to give survey cards on all room service calls to get an idea of how they are doing and how they may be able to continue to improve

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As you can see from the example we were able to identify the issue, use data to see why it is an issue and how we can correct it, implement the changes effectively, and set in place control methods to be able to ensure that it is maintained going forward. Although there are many tools involved in each step, just knowing this basic layout is a great foundation to any project.  Being a Six Sigma Black Belt, I use this methodology on a constant basis.

 I will be going over more tools used in Six Sigma in this blog. If you have questions on this methodology, six sigma in general, or consulting service you can email me directly at thutchinson@fullcirclebusinessconsulting.com or on my website www.Fullcirclebusinessconsulting.com.