Efficient Plant February 2018 - 36

Answers to questions
facing today's reliability
& maintenance
professionals

department | on the floor

Cultural Q
Improvement
A
Takes Work

Why is improving
culture so difficult
and so important?

Dr. Klaus M. Blache
Univ. of Tennessee Reliability and
Maintainability Center (RMC)

Developing a mature culture requires trust
and can take many years to develop; more
than five years if the culture is ingrained.
A productive culture can very quickly be
destroyed without ongoing daily support.

36

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For as long as I can remember,
culture has been, simultaneously,
the top roadblock and leading opportunity for large implementations and
ongoing improvement. In simple terms,
culture is what your employees do when
they think that you are not watching.
Many labels have been used to describe factors that make cultural change
difficult. The top three are fear of change
(lack of confidence), lack of trust (people
need time to accept a new concept), and
lack of a clear communication/understanding of why the change is necessary
(what the future state looks like).
Results analyses, case studies, and
related headlines continue to make
statements such as:
 Culture is the main reason we are
not making faster progress.
 Culture accounts for a large
percentage of ROI.
 There is too much employee
resistance to process change or

introduction of new technology.
I have found that people, in general,
don't resist change. What they resist
is the impact it has on their work and
personal lives. This is where employee
involvement in developing workable
solutions is rightfully discussed.
A mature culture requires trust and
can take many years to develop; more
than five years if the culture is ingrained.
However, it can very quickly be
destroyed without ongoing daily support. Trust and credibility need to be
earned. They don't just happen.
There are exceptions. You often read
about the one-year cultural turnaround
of employees at NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., a joint
venture between GM and Toyota in
California) after Toyota took over the
General Motors plant. What's usually
not mentioned is that the previous plant
closed and this venture was the primary
opportunity for workers to stay employed at their current wage levels. You
can get cultural change in a year if everyone is standing on a burning platform.
In saying this, I'm not discrediting
anything that happened at NUMMI.
Toyota sent hundreds of coaches to
make lean manufacturing work, but also
wanted to learn more about dealing with
American workers. Early in my career,
while I was a manager at GM Corporate
Industrial Engineering, I volunteered to
work the production line several times to
better understand the workforce and had
numerous discussions with various levels of management. These efforts allowed
me to confidently state that the people
and manufacturing processes worked.
When I conduct reliability and

FEBRUARY 2018
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Efficient Plant February 2018
