David Veech is the founding member of the Institute for Lean Systems and serves as its Executive Director. In this Podcast/Transcription: The Fun Side of Standard Work, I asked him about role players.
Joe: So you are saying that when you are building the team, you really do have to identify maybe even the roles within the team a little and get the right role players just like you need to build a basketball team up, let us say, or a football team, you have got to have the right role players. You have got to have a rebounder, and you’ve got to have a shooter, a passing guard or whatever.
David: Well and that is what the teams are going to find out. They are going to find out who is good at what. Even some lean organizations, even some key Toyota suppliers, even Toyota itself in Japan, they tend to have somebody kind of focused on one role. Where to get the true benefits that I am talking about in this self-efficacy article, we really need them to do multiple things. We really need them to rotate. Now, at Kentucky, they rotate very effectively, but when we went to Japan to see them working at Toyota City, they did not rotate. Some of the key Toyota suppliers, they did not rotate.
We talked to some very expert people who were fantastic at their job, but that is the only job they get to do. Variety is one of the key pieces of a satisfying job. Despite the wonderful work environment that you might want to create, if your job sucks, your job sucks.
So, if there are jobs that suck and then jobs that do not suck quite so bad, I want you to do a variety of different things during the day. I think that will have a positive impact on a person’s feelings of their worth, their contribution and I think it will build better skills.
It is also safer because they work different muscle groups, and we have less of a chance of repetitive motion injuries and ergonomic problems. So it is really important to me that we drive this key rotation feature. So, that means the physical structure of the workplace, the engineering behind it, it has got to be in place too for the people stuff to really come out.