7.2 Empower Employees to Make the Decision
One of the ways to reduce waste is to move the burden of decision making from upper level management down to the employee level. Give the employees the responsibility and trust to make educated and smart business decisions.
Moving the decision-making process reduces the amount of time managers need to be in every day functional meetings. This opens their schedules to perform value-added work for the company, instead of sitting in meetings.
Moving the decision process to the employee level opens up manager's time to meet with employees one-on-one. This allows them to focus on employees' career track, potential improvements, and developmental opportunities for them.
Removing managers from the daily decision-making process opens managers to help assist employees, eliminating bottlenecks and roadblocks. When a roadblock is present, the manager is available to break that open and allow the business process to continue. Allowing a roadblock to exist over time is waste.
7.3 Effective Meetings Capturing and Assigning Action
A method to reduce waste from repeating or giving history lessons is to use an efficient system of note taking and item capture. This reduces having to repeat things, and allows the meeting to attack new or pressing agenda items only.
The group note taker needs to record and capture assignments and updates:
- When updating information-only reports, take shorthand notes.
- Notes should be easy to understand - quick and to the point.
- An efficient technique is to write new information in a different font color - this allows the team to see new updated information. For example, writing with blue font indicates new updates.
- Keep old information as a history inside the agenda or notes section. Keep this in black, so the team knows it is history.
- For any urgent items that need review, use a red font color to signal immediate response.
7.4 Reduce Meetings to Information Only, Decide Offline
To reduce the length of the meeting, you can change the meetings to update information only. The true decision-making process is done offline, with the team and management.Direct involvement with individuals helps make the decision quicker and avoid groupthink.
The organization achieves decisions through offline, one-on-one interactions with the team members.
Once the final decision is complete, the team members will just report a status in the meeting, reducing the need to make a decision inside the meeting, itself.
Reporting just an information-only decision reduces the complexity of the meeting, and the details of the report, itself, since there are no big decisions in the meeting.
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