How to Motivate Engineers to Participate in Lean Six Sigma Project

Try to organize very short sessions (max 3 day kaizen type of workshops) to get them on board plus try to do as much preliminary work as possible!

Instead of classroom trainings or long six sigma projects I would reccommend learning by doing activities focusing on a specific tool / problem every time…

Do not forget communicating the success stories to all the people and issue best practices whenever it is possible…

Felix,

Rewards and recognition (R&R) are fun and sometimes difficult programs. A few considerations:
* R&R must be seen as a value to the recipient, not the company. The interesting part of this is that you may find that each engineer may value things differently. You may find it beneficial to have options of relatively equal value for each recipient to pick their reward.
* R&R must be proportional to the company culture. If you are too high or too low, you can de-motivate the organization. You can typically judge this easily by looking at other examples of R&R.
* How will you judge success. It is not only important to be taking action, but also knowing when to stop action. i.e. You need to learn to work on the vital few problems.
* Building easy to understand criteria for R&R can help with this.
* Considerations for criteria: Do you base it on Financial Impact or on properly
following your GB process?, What if you have a low payback project that is
required to be complete to enable a larger project? How do you reward the
first team?
* You may investigate non traditional R&R or you may investigate a competition mentality to help with some of these hurdles.

Shelby

I guess I would suggest a very simple approach to start to investigate this issue.

1) Have engineers been told that it is the expectation for them to continue to do projects? If not, be sure to make this expectation clear to them. How many projects are they supposed to do? How often?
2) Has management provided the necessary resources for them to do follow-up projects? (Training, time, prioritization of issues to solve, support and sponsorship, team members to help?)
3) Is management giving feedback to the engineers regarding their performance on projects? Has management been complacent with the engineers lack of engagement doing projects and not addressed it with them directly to gain understanding?
4) Is life easier for the engineers if they don’t do these projects?
5) Is life harder for the engineers if they do the projects?
– If either 4 or 5 are true you need to re-think your reward system.

If they are Green Belts, and they are trained, then they need managers who are giving them problems to solve. Give me a Green Belt with nothing to do, and I would tell him to give me a capacity model of an area, and identify low hanging fruit (then do projects to improve those areas), or a quality issue, or materials/inventory issue, or…

Summary: Put them to work, under a direct or dotted line manager who will expect real results, with or without formal events.

Brownie points for doing X number of projects only gets you projects, not real results.

Felix C. Veroya Interesting that you are still following up after 3 years. Congratulations. I hope everything is working out well for you.