In the process that I coach for Operational Excellence my favorite phase is when crews start to report and share results from their metrics. Many ask me why it is important to report results from the data the crew are collecting and there are many reasons but two big ones stand out. The first is that the act of reporting results continues to embed "ownership" of those results in the person reporting. Second, and this is particularly true if the group or team are all reporting at once, the reporter gets a clearer picture of how what they do fits into the overall company process and goals. They no longer see their results in isolation but rather as part of the bigger picture.
Boost Employee Engagement From an engagement perspective the first point is gold. Getting employees to own their results is a huge leap forward in terms of driving performance. Ramping up engagement beyond the average of 33% will already reap you big rewards that impact your bottom line. Super Charge Innovation However, this process gets "super-charged" when reporting happens in the larger team or group setting. A frac group I worked with hit this phase in full stride. Daily meetings went from two minutes to thirty minutes almost overnight. As results were shared members of the group began to make connections between what everyone was doing. Suddenly ideas to improve process or maintenance and downtime started coming out of these meetings. When a job was completed all the crews would meet for a post-frac review and they started developing opportunity lists from the things that had come up during the job. Everything from improvements to safety, processes, maintenance and communication and even creating new pieces of equipment went on that list. With the support of the data collected within the team front line leadership were able to implement innovative new approaches to each of these areas. Industry Leaders The result was staggering. Performance burst into the 90% plus range and operational costs and times went down. One crew presented a request for a new piece of equipment that they could prove would save the company over $3M in one year alone! The biggest take away was the response of the clients. One client sent their VP of Operations to congratulate these crews on their outstanding performance and how they had been able to add 25% more wells to their completion cycle that year because of it. New clients heard about them and came knocking to sign them up. But the response that the crews valued the most came in the form of an observation made by one of the operations consultants for a client. He said, and I quote, "In over 30 years of work in this industry I have never seen a team operate at such a high level. You guys are absolutely the pointy tip of the spear with regard to setting new standards of performance for what you do." High praise coming from an industry veteran - and you know in the "patch" those don't come easily! Tap Into Your Tribal Knowledge You better believe that this commentary circulated like wild fire around the crew and they approached every new job with a sense of enthusiasm and vigor. The reality is that there is a lot of useful knowledge (I call it tribal knowledge) circulating around a company. The ability to get your team to develop, track and report on their metrics and tie that to company goals is key to finding and using that knowledge. Metrics moves which moves to reporting and on to innovating and developing new metrics, that how this cycle should fit together. Reporting is key to innovation, don't miss out on that part of your Operational Excellence cycle. Performance Leadership - Think About It! Comments are closed.
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January 2021
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