By Robert Martichenko, Chair, TrailPath Workplace Solutions

The Cultural enablers dimension of the Shingo Model ™ emphasizes the foundational role of people and leadership in driving organizational excellence. As we have learned, without a strong principled culture, sustainable improvement and organizational alignment are not possible. Learning from the Shingo Model, we understand that a critical principle relative to culture is Respect Every Individual. Respect Every Individual emphasizes the importance of valuing and empowering people at every level of the organization. It embodies how we exemplify dignity and self-worth —the essence of treating every employee, customer, and stakeholder with value, regardless of their role or status. The focus is on the individual: knowing, understanding, and improving people as unique individuals.

While the principle of Respect Every Individual is firmly entrenched in our organizational excellence lexicon, we are always left with the question of how to implement this principle. Instead of thinking about a “one brush stroke” strategy for this principle, what if we had a Path for Every Team Member (PFETM) that acknowledges and understands the vast range of needs and motivations of people as individuals?

PFETM is the development plan for individual team members to sincerely participate in their work environment. This plan is the learning-and-action-plan that recognizes all people are unique and have individual needs to thrive inside the organization. With this unique and personal plan in place, all team members can participate by believing in the organization and by building sincere, honest, and trustworthy relationships. Additionally, they contribute to creating meaningful employment environments for everyone. With this idea in mind, what areas of our work environment would we focus on for these individual paths?

The Work Environment

Three core factors are critical to the work environment to achieve a PFETM: autonomy & control, fairness & equity, and a loyal social community.

Autonomy and control are a result of work environments that are flexible, secure, and predictable. People require flexibility in their work environment to feel in control of their lives. In addition, we yearn for a high level of predictability in our work and assurance that our future is secure. The fact is, most people want to be in control of their lives, and the absence of this control will result in fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety result in a lack of trust.

Team members today, particularly those on the frontline, crave mutual respect and to be treated with fairness and equity, regardless of their position in the organization. It is important that our opinions matter, that our personal experiences are valued, and that we are treated as the unique individuals we are—where our life circumstances are known, understood, and improved upon.

The last important piece to our work environment is recognizing that people want to be part of a positive social community. We grow through loyal friendships with shared values and strive to be part of a successful community where we share similar experiences and like-mindedness in how we approach our work. Even though it is the workplace, as leaders, we must recognize that people take pride in true friendships that support them in becoming their best selves. Ultimately, team members want to be part of a successful community and a winning team.

The Work

To achieve a PFETM, we need to know how people feel about important aspects of their work, recognizing that the work is very different from the work environment. The environment is where we do our work; the work is the set of activities we perform. People want to perform work that is purposeful and meaningful, where, as an organization, we are proficient in our work and can experience success in improving our work at the end of each day. This means that, as leaders and team members, we need to be fundamentally focused on knowing the work, understanding the work, and improving the work.

As an organization, we need to know and understand that people want to know why their work is important, how their role connects to the customer’s purpose, and how to perform the job proficiently to truly understand why the work is worth doing well. This means that, as leaders, we must ensure our teams understand why their particular role is important and how it impacts overall team success. To accomplish this, all team members must be properly trained and have the tools and technology to execute their roles successfully.

In this new environment, our work needs to be well-designed, understood, adequately supported at all levels, and free of obstacles. Performance needs to be visible, and we must ask for input from the people doing the work on how the work can be better designed and executed, including understanding how adjacent processes impact the work. People want the freedom to communicate obstacles in their work and to provide positively received input into improvement ideas.

Lastly, it is critical that, as leaders, we sincerely believe that our team wants to be successful and learn and grow as a result of improving their work. No reasonable person wants to waste their life simply working for a wage. People want to experience victories and know their work adds value to the customer, team, and organization. People want to learn and progress in their education and development by improving their work and sharing that learning with others. Our people desire to be part of a winning team—something that is greater than themselves.

These important aspects of work are in absolute alignment with the Shingo Model.

The Time is Now!

People expect to be treated with respect and have a further expectation to perform purposeful and meaningful work, all within a meaningful work environment. This means that, as an organization, we must build cultures of organizational excellence, and as leaders, we must focus on respect and meaningful work. With this in place, all employees have a shared role and responsibility to fully participate and engage within this meaningful employment environment. It is a triad system of organizational decision-making based on people first, modernized leadership behaviors focused on dignity, and an expectation of full-contact team member participation to make the work meaningful.

Establishing the PFETM is incredibly important as it will result in our ability to have the right people in the right roles with the right skills and the right participative attitude—all because of a commitment to a personalized development path for each team member. This recognizes that, first and foremost, people want to progress and thrive in the workplace so they can also thrive in their home lives. The ability to improve people’s work lives and, in the process, improve their home life, communities, and the world is simply good business. It is simply the right thing to do.

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