Hagedorn Case Study 2:

The challenge: Engaging 8,000 workers and 400 managers in an effort to increase productivity, collaboration and employee satisfaction at a global auto manufacturing company.

Specifically, a major player in the global truck business experienced tremendous growth at its biggest plant — one of the biggest and most complex truck manufacturing plants in the world, with more than 8,000 employers. Within 3 years 3,800 new workers had been hired to meet growing production demands. Employees on shop floor level were organized in self-managing working groups under guidance of group leaders and supervisors.

To insure further integration of new employees and to drive the enhancement of productivity and employee satisfaction, the plant’s top management decided to invest in an intensive team building process with focus on:

• Enhancement of self-management and individual responsibility
• Qualification of new workers and requalification of incumbents in all major aspects of the production system
• Opening opportunity and support to solve problems within working groups in terms of collaboration, quality, productivity, communication, conflict management and other group objectives
• Interconnection of management and workers of all levels and increase management attention to the shop floor where value is created
• To detect potential for optimization and intensify continuous improvement
• To facilitate the implementation of a new shift system and to start the change process for 8,000 workers to make the system effective as quick as possible 
• Hagedorn was working as a production manager at this plant and was assigned the leadership and overall responsibility for the project — including creating the concept, running the process, organizing a teambuilding event for all 8,000 employees, process evaluation and public relations.

How did he do it? His step-by-step process is outlined below:

I. Concept development and start of qualification
A. Set up an interdisciplinary core project team (10 members)
The project team comprised 10 representatives, one from each of the major plant departments in order to prompt buy-in.

B. Concept
The team chose to hold three two-day workshops in order to identify the major process challenges. But how were Hagedorn and his team to create an effective and sustainable process that included so many people at a tremendous cost in terms of both time and money? They needed a process-setting strategy that ensured efficiency and sustainability.

The process couldn’t be done in a single day, as the process required that they be able to prepare the employees, get their attention, give them time to learn and then empower them to take action. The team chose to divide the teambuilding process in four parts.

II. How to qualify and to facilitate learning? 
First, the team needed to qualify all 8,000 blue collar workers. Their idea was to teach all concepts of the company’s production system. People should learn about quality, Kaizen, group work and LEAN management and understand how to apply the concepts in their daily work. In order to do so, Hagedorn and the group decided to use existing regular weekly group meetings as platforms for teaching sessions.

In these group meetings, which were already fixed in calendars, the group could teach one a week for 30 minutes over a period of 4 month. They spent 20 minutes teaching and left 10 minutes for discussion and questions. This set up ensured that employees had a lot of time to learn, to repeat and to discuss topics. 

Next, they had to figure out how to enable effective teaching in a group meeting setting. To enable the supervisors to teach the elements of the production system, Hagedorn and his team had to provide them with teaching materials. Since they had no computers or projectors in the group meeting areas, they printed the learning materials on flip charts. This was additionally a good choice because supervisors were used to work with them. The team made sure to make the design appealing and “did everything in our power not to bore people,” he jokes.

III. How to hook people and to focus on group requirements?
The group wanted employees to engage with the process and to feel a sense of ownership. Rather than a top-down event, they wanted a bottom-up process that would be viewed as a strong signal to all employers that the shop floor is the most important place in a manufacturing environment. 

The idea was to open opportunity to name three topics considered as important by the working groups and focus on these during the group meetings. The topics had to be related to one field of the production system. Hagedorn and his team then helped employees to apply what they had learned to the issues within the working group by giving them time to discuss topics, to align all group members, to prioritize and to prepare for the upcoming teambuilding event that was being organized to work on one of the three issues in depth. This way, they had a process of interaction as opposed to a one-way teaching process while still meeting the requirements of their charge.

IV. How to create time and opportunity to work efficiently on named topics?
The team understood that they needed to give people time and room to work on these topics efficiently. In their mind, there was only one way to do this — and it had the added benefit of demonstrating how important this exercise was: To stop the entire production line for one day. They then organized two seven-hour workshops, one on the first shift and one on the second shift to give plenty of time to work on topics. They also were sure to involve all managers of the plant and make them part of the process

“A production stop would be the strongest signal that our top management could send to underline the importance of the production system and the need for commitment from all employees,” Hagedorn says. “A production stop on a plant with a daily output of 400 trucks is usually unthinkable, but we made it happen.”

V. How to save results and make the process sustainable?
To make results sustainable, the team ensured that the process went on after the teambuilding event. The process itself had to be reviewed, the proposed designated action had to be monitored and the working groups had to be supported further to ensure the process took hold. They called this process step “Transfer and Safeguarding.”

VI. How to moderate a team building process with 8,000 people?
In order to qualify and to work with 8,000 people, the team needed the support of facilitators. It was clear that the efficiency of every step depended on the skills of the moderator who was in charge. Some of the 379 working groups consisted of 25 to 35 members. It takes some skill and confidence to handle this challenge.

Hagedorn’s solution was to recruit all the managers at the plant and activate the two group leaders of every working group. The involvement of all managers at the plant, no matter from which department and hierarchy level, sent another very strong signal to all employees.

Every manager was assigned to a working group. The managers partnered with the group leaders and had to share moderation. That was an epiphany for most managers, who had never to deal with shop floor issues in their career. The blue collar workers experienced for the first time full attention and commitment of the whole management team to the shop floor.

The concept — to interconnect all managers with the group leaders, supervisors and blue collar workers — turned out to be one of the key success factors of the process and helped to change the plant’s culture both significantly and sustainably.

VII: Moderator training
Group leaders had already moderation skills, but the team wanted them to refresh and expand their knowledge. Because a group was usually led by two leaders, they had to train more than 750 moderators plus 400 managers from all departments (many of whom surely had moderation skills, but no experience to handle a group of 30 and more on the shop floor). In fact, the challenge of moderating a 7-hour workshop would be daunting even for the most experienced moderator.

The project team understood the need to prepare moderators well and that they had to support the partnership between group leaders and the manager who was assigned to a work group. So Hagedorn and the team developed a particular training for the moderators and held four sessions with 350 participants at a time. During the training, moderators got advice, learned new skills and how to apply them and built a partnership with the managers. Every tandem got a toolkit for the team-building event, with prepared flip chart papers, pencils, cards, etc. as well as a designed handbook to facilitate the moderation.

The end result: Award-winning. Hagedorn and his team received the gold award in a global competition, beating out hundreds of similar projects. But even more importantly, after five months of preparation, qualification and training, the event went off without a hitch and was an overwhelming success.

“Everyone was a little bit nervous, but the atmosphere and the results exceeded our expectations by far,” Hagedorn says.

The efficiency, productivity, quality and the engagement of the working groups was raised to a new level. A change of culture was palpable and continues to this day, making the plant more efficient by a factor of 10. As a bonus, the company got many more ideas for continuous improvement and optimization than expected, leading to a savings of $7 million.