The Restroom Gemba – Lean Tools For Virtual Teams

Illustration: Lee Sauer

“The things we fear most in organizations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity.” - Margaret Wheatley

Whether it’s quiet quitting, turnover contagion, burnout, recessionary layoffs, stagflation or a combination, organizations across all industries have little reprieve from disruption post-pandemic.  

As a Lean Six Sigma consultant during the Great Recession more than a decade ago, I can relate. Week after week I encountered sites navigating heartbreaking tradeoffs, each more beleaguered than the last.   Few process improvement implementations seemed feasible amidst the economic collapse, so we modified tools where the culture allowed and relished in small gains.   

One such tool adaptation arose from the imperative to quickly (and informally) assess the health of the organization, jokingly coined “The Restroom Gemba” (Gemba walks denote the action of going to see the actual process, understand the work, ask questions, and learn).

A walk to the restroom in any workplace setting can offer an abundance of engagement insights. Are the workspaces and teams energetic? Is there evidence of shared visual work (key performance indicators, metrics, goals, process maps)? As an outsider to the workplace, does anyone question my presence? Am I offered directions? Does anyone acknowledge me? Is there eye contact?

Organizational health and the employee experience are paramount, and in today’s environment leaders are tasked with cultivating effective teams that are increasingly virtual, often with minimal resources.  Respect for people is foundational to Lean and Agile methodologies. Lean (and Agile) tools translate across industries and, when reframed, can be incorporated in virtual and hybrid work environments. 

Virtual Gemba Walks

The Gemba Walk – or “go and see” – challenges leaders to gather information through observation and interaction with workers. The Gemba can be walked virtually using video conference application supplemented with document collaboration (Google Docs, Office 365) or process mapping software.

Virtual team huddles can provide a consistent framework for following the value stream remotely. If the term seems inert, consider how Intermountain Healthcare scaled their 15-minute huddle to create alignment and provide extraordinary care across 23 hospitals, 170 clinics and an 850,000-member health insurance plan.

The Industrial Internet of Things brought virtual reality and augmented reality to the factory floor and newly virtual industries are quick to adopt these types of innovations. If wearable technologies aren’t in the budget, hand-held or web cameras can stream the walk across platforms and teams with little cost to the organization.

Virtual Andon Cord 

In manufacturing, the Andon cord is a mechanism that simultaneously stops the production line and signals a quality or safety issue to the workforce. Attributed to Toyota Production System, the elegance wasn’t in the cord (it was a rope) but in the culture reinforced with each pull:

“The team member did not, or would never be, in a position of feeling fear or retribution for stopping the line. Quite the contrary, the team member was always rewarded verbally. What Toyota was saying to the team member was, ‘We thank you and your CEO thanks you. You have saved a customer from receiving a defect.’ Moreover, they were saying, ‘You have given us (Toyota) an opportunity to learn and for that we really thank you.’ No defect was too small or even if the Cord was mistakenly pulled, the response would never be negative.”

Amazon designed a virtual Andon cord for customer service that empowers service agents to remove problematic products from distribution until the defects are resolved.                                              

Alternatively, Netflix’s virtual Andon cord, “Chaos Monkey”, intentionally and randomly terminates server instances to proactively identify system vulnerabilities. Chaos Monkey challenges engineers to design more resilient solutions – a form of chaos engineering and fundamental aspect of their culture.

Virtual Kanban

Online Kanban boards were popular pre-pandemic. They’re intuitive, customizable and enable workflow visualization across teams. When organizations employ their work in progress management features, Kanban boards become powerful Lean tools. 

Conclusion

Disruption can be used as a catalyst to transform culture; companies can create environments where creativity and iterative experimentation engage employees throughout the organization.

As organizations adjust to the new ways of working, leaders must recognize the value in role-modeling interactions that put people above processes and tools. How engaged is your workforce? What would a virtual restroom Gemba walk reveal?