“…bringing together people from the organisation who know the issues best…”

eWork-Out is a vehicle for encouraging ‘extra-organisational’ dialogue.

Whether the dialogue is across levels, functions, geographies or organisational boundaries, eWork-Out instills the basics of how to truly talk with each other…

First, participants learn about how to understand each other's language.

One of the reasons why dialogue is so constrained in organisations is that people often don't take the time to understand each other and to realise that the same words can carry different meanings.

This kind of listening and understanding is essential for people to work together and is, thus, the first phase of dialogue we encourage in eWork-Out — what we call learning how to “talk the talk” of each other…

… Once people have a common framework for talking about their worlds, they can begin the process of joint problem solving.

To do this, however, requires a next level of dialogue — what we call learning how to “translate talk into walk”.…

eWork-Out participants learn how to go beyond understanding the ‘as-is’ state and begin to envision a different future, without being defensive or self-limiting.

Participants overcome and deal with constraining attitudes — “we tried this several years ago”, or “that's a good idea, but ___”, or “our customers (or suppliers, bosses, regulators or investors) will never go along with this” — challenging them continually to ask, “why not?” and encouraging them to generate large numbers of ideas before doing any evaluation or analysis.

In addition, our eWork-Out “Advocates” ensure the participants select action ideas that have the best chance of real success, and carve out projects that can be tested in 90 days or less.

Identifying action ideas is, of course, not enough.  eWork-Out also shows how to implement ideas, or how to “walk the talk”

…With each Work-Out, participants learn how to construct action plans that lay out the key steps for implementing their approved ideas — including responsibilities, measures and deadlines.

For many, implementing a change programme, no matter the scope, is a significant learning process and a critical part of the “walk the talk” process.

This develoment of “Work-Out dialogue” is a major reason why eWork-Out has such power and impact — and can affect the results and culture of all kinds of organisations.

The basic premise of eWork-Out:

… that the more people in the organisation experience, together, the process of overcoming real-world problems business managers and employees face on a daily basis — in order fulfillment; in supply chain management; order-to-cash; claims processing; compliance and governance; in product design, product development and product management; in pinpointing and eliminating unnecessary costs and realising new revenue streams… — the more productivity rises throughout the organisation, the fresher, more vital, more outward-looking and more focused everyone becomes in providing customers with what they want, when they want it, with significant value generated and/or saved…

…which means that your organisation's capacity for change itself becomes entrenched and institutionalised, boosting your ability to deliver quality services to your customers

Case Study #1

How a manufacturer reduced dramatically the number of customer complaints, improving its levels of customer service and its bottom line

One of our clients was the products division of a ‘blue chip’ company, selling a variety of kitchenware and related appliances — some manufactured in-house and some assembled or bought ready made — to large and small retailers, ranging from household name supermarkets to local “iron mongers”.

Sales were growing steadily, but not as rapidly as customer complaints, returns and claims.  Margins were eroding and sales reps were reporting that customers were losing confidence in the quality of their products.

The MD couldn't put her finger on any one single cause of this claims problem.  There seemed to be a lot of factors spread across the division — manufacturing problems, design issues, poor training of retailers, installation faults and more.  Despite all the data about these problems, nothing anyone had tried had done anything to stem the flow of complaints.

The client decided it was time to take action.  Because the issues were interrelated and the accountability crossed all of the division's functions, she decided that eWork-Out's process would help break the logjam and get some positive results.

We met up with the client early on a Monday morning.  The first thing we had to do was nail down a goal and several focused issues for the Work-Out

The client was none too impressed.  “Isn't that clear?  Our margins are shrinking and quality's down the pan.  We have to jump on that.”  But we persuaded her that that was too broad for a Work-Out; we needed things a group could address in concrete terms.  One or two focused issues that affect margins and quality where her people could pick a course of action and get moving fast.

We met a couple more times during that week and started to narrow down the focus for the Work-Out.  Margins were shrinking mainly because of specific complaints that required the company to provide free repairs or replacements.  A third meeting was with the MD and a few of her managers, plus a couple of people from the “high potential” list to help design the Work-Out.  The Quality Manager brought to the meeting a stack of data on the underlying causes of all recent claims, complaints and returns, and we found that there were problems cropping up throughout the production and marketing process, from design through to manufacturing, retailer training and installation.

We set a goal of reducing the claims rate from 18 per cent to two per cent, within four months.  And, having defined that goal, we identified several focus areas to be addressed.  One focus was a particular product that seemed to be generating an especially large percentage of claims.  A second focus was to be on shipping and distribution, since it seemed that many of the claims stemmed from breakage occurring in transit.  A third team was to look at the quality process in the plant to see if there were better ways to prevent defects at the source.

By the end of the week, the design team had selected about 40 people who might make an input to the three focus areas, representing all the functions that were involved in the process.  And the eWork-Out session began.

At the “Town Hall” meeting, attended by the MD and a panel of five other senior leaders, 16 recommendations were presented.  The management panel asked questions to probe the chances of success and the likely benefits of each recommendation.  Lots of people seemed to be gettting involved in the dialogue.  The MD was struck by how much passion there was behind these ideas.  At the end of each presentation, the team members looked up expectantly, waiting for a decision.  Some recommendations were no-brainers, because the improvement would be immediate, or the potential payoff was so obvious.  And there were a couple of obvious no-go's as well, — where the cost of implementation just wouldn't be worth it.

In all, twelve improvement ideas were approved, and specific individuals had volunteered to drive each idea to implementation.

Our facilitators helped of the twelve “recommendation owners” — one eWork-Out participant for each of the approved ideas — get up and running immediately after the Work-Out.  Each owner, some of them with teams to help, had three months to make the assigned action recommendation a reality.

To smooth their way, the MD sent out an announcement the after the Town Hall Meeting, telling her staff what was approved and listing the projects there were being kicked off.  She made it clear that the owners and their teams had the power to do whatever it took to get their assigned action recommendation in place in the specified time, and that they had her full backing.

Four weeks after the Work-Out, the Products Division had hit, with some areas exceeding, their target.

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