LEAN ACCOUNTING BEST PRACTICES FOR SUSTAINABLE INTEGRATIONE phần 5 pps

• “Have responsibility, a sense of ownership, satisfaction in accomplish￾ments, power over what and how things are done, recognition for their

ideas, and the knowledge that they are important to the organization.”11

Taken together, these definitions offer a very complex view of empower￾ment and its impact on employee performance. Beyond giving employees the

authority to make decisions, their decision must be made with forewarning of

the likely outcomes, and employees must feel that their informed decisions

will benefit the entire enterprise. This means that the employees must feel sat￾isfied that they are consistently instrumental in making decisions that impact

the success of the whole enterprise. Empowering employees suddenly looks

more and more like a very big job! But let’s break it down. Bradley Kirkman

and Benson Rosen12 do just that. They offer a framework for considering the

complexities of the empowerment process and a definition of empowerment

with four key dimensions.

(a) Employees Who Believe in Their Competencies

First, employees need to believe that they can be effective in performing

tasks and reaching their goals. The bottom line is that higher employee com￾petence and skills lead to better decision processes and ultimately to decisions

that move the enterprise forward. Employee competence and skills are inex￾tricably tied to performance. When a team tackles a problem, team members

consciously and unconsciously take inventory of each other’s skills and ex￾perience to determine whether the team has the critical skill set to accomplish

the job. Team member confidence increases when the team collectively per￾ceives that it has all the necessary skills. However, confidence plummets if the

team is missing crucial experience or a critical skill.

By the same token, team members also look outside the team for ways that

the enterprise can support their perceived needs. Support may take the form

of access to information, supervisory encouragement, resources, and (espe￾cially) training. Again, when the lean team believes that it either has the nec￾essary support or can get it, confidence increases. However, when teams observe

that valid requests have been denied by budgetary constraints, teams become

more discouraged and lose confidence. The result, of course, is less effort, less

participation by the people who mean most to lean success, less innovation,

and poorer performance.

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Two management practices get lean teams off on the right foot. First, assign

projects to the right team. This means a deliberate evaluation of team mem￾bers’ prior experience, training, and accumulated knowledge before assigning

them a project. Properly matching skills and experience with a project is of pri￾mary importance. A mismatch dooms a team to failure and the demoralization

that undermines all lean enterprise efforts for transformation from conven￾tional thinking and behaviors. When teams review their process and select their

own project, many traditional companies on the transition to lean encourage

teams to first tackle small projects that can be quickly accomplished.

The second way to increase employee confidence in their competencies is

to consistently acknowledge an awareness of the resource needs of the value

stream or cell team. Communicate. Comunicate. Communicate. Managers who

frequently interact with their teams and offer assistance are better positioned

to recognize resource needs, provide help as needed, and give sound, timely

reasons when resources are not available.

(b) Employee Perceptions of Authority and Independence

Lean employees need to be given a clear degree of authority to make decisions

and the freedom and independence in choosing their actions as those actions

align with lean principles. Being told that you can make a decision is very dif￾ferent than being allowed to make a decision. The traditional control structure

surrounding decisions and actions often becomes so burdensome and threat￾ening that employees feel betrayed by financial goals as they make honest ef￾forts to improve the operational processes that improve enterprise performance

and lead to financial success. In these environments, the team does not have

sufficient authority to carry out its enterprise-mandated mission, and members

becomes unsure about the team’s authentic authority to carry out the enterprise

mission.

The pivotal understanding in any transformation from traditional cost ac￾counting and performance management systems is that control is never eas￾ily relinquished. After all, management’s traditional job is to steer the ship and

preserve the future of the enterprise for all its stakeholders. It is difficult to do

so without assurances that the people making these decisions are considering

the best interests of the enterprise. How can a member of a small cell team re￾ally understand the import of their decisions? Is it really a matter of giving up

control? Certainly not in a lean environment! But it is a matter of articulating

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a very clear structure of authority for decision making—a structure based on

meeting customer demands, not on conformity to artificially contrived struc￾tures of organizational control designed to meet shareholder expectations.

In The New Why Teams Don’t Work, Harry Robbins and Michael Finely de￾scribe these decision authority dilemmas between teams and managers in tra￾ditional organizations.13 Redefining authority structures is very confusing and

at times requires arbitration or at least some kind of negotiation. Traditional

solutions propose that we think in terms of boundary management, which is

a process of agreeing to a set of constraints or boundaries within which lean

work teams are free to make decisions on their own. Susan Mohrman, coauthor

of Designing Team-Based Organizations, agrees and calls the constraint a re￾sults framework.

14 This method provides the team with decision parameters,

as well as an idea of available resources for potential solutions. The point is to

communicate any parameters the lean work team needs up front so that there

is no confusion or disappointment on the part of the team and so that manage￾ment can rest easy knowing that the team understands applicable limits.

(c) Employee Perceptions of their Work Contributions

Employees must perceive their task as meaningful. People want their efforts

to mean something. In a work environment, employee job satisfaction and com￾mitment grows as they see the impact their work has on the success of the en￾terprise. Performance measurements play an important role in communicating

this kind of value to employees. For example, a lean production work cell in

a manufacturing facility uses carefully selected process measures visibly dis￾played on the cell’s metric board. The cell team members themselves are re￾sponsible for updating the metrics throughout the day. As the cell team members

make decisions, they can see how those decisions affect the metrics. This

gives the team immediate feedback to validate prior actions or to institute

changes.

(d) Employee Perceptions of Value to the Enterprise

One of the greatest lean performance challenges is to support employee per￾ceptions of their value to the enterprise in service organizations. Employees

must perceive that the organization values their work. This appreciation is

communicated through recognition programs where employees are rewarded

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