Studying the Success Process

"To release our unlimited potential for growth and business leadership."

An impressive Vision Statement for all members of Team Taycal, according to Quest's Jim Buell, who took on the challenge.

Taycal Press, a high-end printer in a very competitive business, made a major commitment to becoming a high performance workplace. To achieve this, 5 years ago management set about increasing the interpersonal skills and business understanding of all employees, from the executive offices to the shop floor.

Taycal and Quest partnered to create a course of study for management and hourly workers to help Taycal achieve their vision. In addition, the program was designed to enable employees to more fully participate in their own career development within the company.

The program's organizational goal is to move from a system of supervisors to self-directed work teams.

The ROI goal is to create efficiencies that will improve profit margin, allowing Taycal to increase profit sharing and raise wage levels.

Based on those goals, a curriculum was implemented covering the fundamentals of Total Quality Management (TQM), Continuous Product Improvement (CPI), Team Building, Conflict Management and Communication Skills. Over the next several years, building on this information and sharing it throughout the facility in both formal and informal sessions, the desired team structure evolved.

The effort was counted a success when the "supervisor" level was replaced with a small support team, under the guidance of the General Manager. The team worked to provide the production and sales teams with ongoing information they need to be self-managing.

However, after five years, this dynamic had begun to plateau, according to Buell. A combination of employee turnover, inadequate training and lack of focus had eroded the level of conscious practice of these disciplines. Senior management believed this indicated a need to revisit many of the original program elements, especially communication and team building skills.

"We decided the work teams needed to move to the next steps in CPI and Reengineering in order to develop true ownership of their processes," continued Buell. "Though Taycal's work teams had been collecting management data for several years, they did not have the knowledge necessary to move this to an effective plan of operational process improvement."

Together, Quest and Taycal updated and improved the programs, with some exciting additions. "The 2002 curriculum is designed around the need to revive our communication skills and improve our team structure," comments one team member. "In addition, we focused on 1) a need to gain knowledge about data analysis, 2) managing the change process and, 3) reviving our emphasis on the customer (internal and external),"

"By changing the training to six 8-hour days instead of the 'traditional' twelve 4-hour segments, subjects could be covered in more depth," says Buell. "For example: we had intended to spend four hours on Managing Customer Service (with an emphasis on the internal customer). I was showing the overhead 'Ten Components of Service Quality.' The group identified three they wanted to work on. We allowed the discussion to develop and it went beyond the allotted eight hours. The groups actually continued their discussions back on the job in the following week!"

A real eye-opener for the group happened during a discussion of Work Measurement. It became apparent the participants misunderstood the difference between goals vs. standards. Many in the group felt the standard was the goal and did not understand they needed to work to improve the standard. That experience really got the group excited about both their ability and their need to set their own operating goals. They also now know how to interpret the data they are collecting to improve their individual work output.

Now that they have finished this second round of training, which again included a cross section of management and hourly workers from all teams, Team Taycal plans to bring this information into their daily work processes. This includes team meetings and cross-functional project teams. It will be used to plan a new set of measurements, selected by the work teams, which will focus on operational improvement.