My guest for Episode 311 is Jess Orr, a continuous improvement practitioner at WestRock, a large paper and packaging company, where she helps plants foster a culture of continuous improvement and employee engagement.
Her experience includes working directly for Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky. She is particularly passionate about sharing best practices across industries, which motivated her to found Yokoten Learning.
Jess shares candid reflections on the differences between a tool-driven Six Sigma environment and Toyota's culture of continuous improvement and respect for people. She describes what it was like to leave Toyota for another company, and how she used her Toyota experiences to build engagement and capability in a struggling facility. The highlight of the conversation is her powerful story of leading an effort that saved 200 jobs by involving every employee in improvement, shifting culture, and creating sustainable results.
Other themes include the importance of leadership buy-in, the “inverted organization” model that elevates frontline workers, and how focusing on process (rather than chasing results) produces lasting impact. Jess also shares the “safari” analogy for Lean–reminding us that improvement is a journey full of discovery, not something you implement and finish.
Listeners will come away inspired by Jess's practical stories and her conviction that Lean, when practiced with respect, is not only the right thing to do but also the most effective way to secure long-term business success.
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Transcript:
Announcer:
Welcome to the Lean Blog Podcast. Visit our website at www.leanblog.org. Now, here's your host, Mark Graban.
Mark Graban:
Hi, this is Mark Graban. Welcome to episode 311 of the podcast. It's July 24, 2018. My guest today is Jess Orr. She is a continuous improvement practitioner at Westrock, a large paper and packaging company, where she helps plants foster a culture of continuous improvement and employee engagement. Her career experience includes working directly for Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky. She's particularly passionate about sharing best practices across industries, which motivated her to found her company, Yokoten Learning.
In today's episode, we talk about her path from being a Six Sigma black belt at a previous company to being a Lean-thinking engineer at Toyota. How did she progress from solving problems herself to developing others? We'll also talk about a blog post that she wrote for my blog earlier this year about how a team saved 200 jobs. The headline of the post was actually “How 200 Jobs Were Saved by Engaging Employees in Continuous Improvement.” She'll talk about that story, and we'll discuss other concepts and topics: Lean and Return on Investment, leadership, culture, and more. So I hope you enjoy the discussion. If you want to find links to her blog post, her website, and her LinkedIn page, you can go to leanblog.org/311.
Well Jess, hi. Thank you for being a guest on the podcast. How are you?
Jess Orr:
Thanks, Mark. I'm doing really well. It's a pleasure to be on here. I've listened to most of the Lean Blog podcasts, so it's exciting to actually be on myself.
Mark Graban:
Well, good. I'm happy to talk to you. You've got a lot of great experience and stories to share. Maybe you can tell the listeners how you first got exposed to continuous improvement.
From Six Sigma Expert to Lean Facilitator
Jess Orr:
Well, my name is Jess Orr, and I work as a continuous improvement practitioner at Westrock. I've been in industry for about 12 years. I went to school for mechanical engineering, and I started working as a tooling engineer. I had the opportunity to take Six Sigma black belt training, and I'd never really seen anything quite like that. Some of the tools they taught us on how to improve processes–I really fell in love with it. I started applying it in my work and seeing some good results, but it was always very focused on the tools. “What tool can I use to solve this problem? How can I solve this problem?”
While we saw some good gains from a lot of the work that was done using that methodology, I noticed that it was limited in how well it sustained. There was something that was missing. I had the opportunity to work for Toyota, and that's where I really started to get introduced to Lean concepts and things like “respect for people.” That's where I really started understanding the power of engaging everyone in the process of continuous improvement. That really accelerated my journey, my learning, and the effectiveness that I was able to facilitate with those teams. I spent about five years at Toyota and then transitioned into my current role.
Mark Graban:
And what types of roles did you have at Toyota?
Jess Orr:
At Toyota, I started off working as a stamping die designer. So for new product models that came out, we would have to design the dies to stamp the shell body components for them. Sitting in front of a computer for 10 hours a day was not my favorite thing to do, so I transitioned to a quality engineering role and started off as a quality engineer and then moved up to an assistant manager.
Mark Graban:
I'd be curious to explore a little bit of compare and contrast between Six Sigma certification and projects versus a culture of continuous improvement at Toyota. If the focus is on tools and the individual focus of “how can I solve it,” that's different from what you experienced at Toyota, right?
Jess Orr:
Yeah, absolutely. I definitely would not knock Six Sigma at all. I still use it in my current work. It's appropriate depending on the problem that you're trying to solve. But what I learned at Toyota was it was much more of a holistic approach. It was, “How can we engage people, especially the process owners?” I would say that's one of the biggest differences that I found.
With my Six Sigma training, I kind of came in as being the expert, right? “I'm the one who's been trained on these tools. I'm the belt.” Versus the approach that I learned at Toyota, it was all about the team. How can we engage everyone, especially the people who understand the process the best, the ones that are doing it every day? I saw a shift in my role. I'm not really leading the efforts with this approach; I'm just supporting and facilitating other people to make their work better. It was a big mind shift for me, really, having to learn what it means to be a project leader is really to facilitate the team to make those improvements themselves. The results were very sustainable because if it's their idea, they're more likely to keep doing it. They've got some ownership of it.
Bringing Toyota Principles to a New Culture
Mark Graban:
I've been guilty of falling into that same trap of being the engineer, the expert, the problem solver. I think it can be tough for people if they're not in that Toyota-type environment. How do we use Toyota practices in an environment with a different culture or style of leadership?
Jess Orr:
I do. I would say the culture at my current company is great in terms of how they really empower me as a practitioner to do what works. At the end of the day, what really helps with that buy-in from leadership is seeing those results. I would recommend to anybody whose leaders are kind of resistant to using these types of engagement… I sometimes ask them to “suspend your disbelief.” You know, give me three months, and let's see what the results are. And then we can adjust and adapt based on those. And so far, knock on wood, that's worked pretty well, because this process of continuous improvement through employee engagement, it works. It really does.
Mark Graban:
It works. And that's the challenge: how can you convince a leader who doesn't share that belief? I wrote a blog post triggered by a hospital where leaders said, “The only improvement we value here is big projects with large ROI.” And they described what they're doing as “Lean.” That kind of misses the mark where Kaizen, continuous improvement, is one of the two pillars of the Toyota Way, along with respect for people.
Jess Orr:
No, it's true. I've seen that as well, where people get excited about the Lean tools, and they are exciting–one-piece flow, A3s. But they focus so much on the tools that they don't understand that the tools work best in an environment that facilitates people and empowers and educates them on how to use them.
I think the reason companies don't focus on the culture first… it's hard to get your mind wrapped around what a culture of continuous improvement looks like. It's more difficult to understand how to build a culture, and that takes time. It's not easy, and it's difficult to measure. Companies are worried about the bottom line. They want to see tangible things they can measure. And when you focus so much on those results and not the process, you lose the results.
I like the analogy of managing your weight. If all you're focused on is that number on the scale, you're going to be limited. But if you say, “No, we're going to focus on the process. How am I eating? Am I exercising?” the results, that weight, is a byproduct of focusing on that process. But it's tough to get leaders to understand that.
Lessons from Inside Toyota
Mark Graban:
I don't think Toyota is engaging people only because it's respectful. I think they're engaging people because it's good for the health of the business over time, right?
Jess Orr:
Yeah. I actually had this same conversation with someone the other day. I said, “You know, ethics and morality aside…” If I'm one person trying to make an impact on the results, how can I be as effective as a plant of 500 people? The sheer scale is going to limit my effectiveness. I would absolutely agree with you. Ethics aside–and it is the right thing to do, it's being respectful–but if you really want to impact your bottom line, this is the way to do it.
Mark Graban:
Thinking back to that culture that you were hired into at Toyota, I'm curious if you have some other lessons learned or favorite stories.
Jess Orr:
Yeah, there are several things that stand out to me. One of the ones that really stuck with me is the value that they placed on the frontline workers. They talk about the “inverted organization.” The traditional organization is top-down. And Toyota said, “Now we're going to flip that triangle upside down.” So we're going to elevate those frontline workers, and the leadership, we exist to support them. And that was very striking how that was actually lived out. It was far easier to fire someone in management than it was a team member.
There was this aura of respect for the team member. We would have daily huddles where we'd report out on issues we were having in quality. Anytime as an assistant manager, if I got up to speak, I could expect to be challenged. But if a team member came up and spoke, someone from the line, you could feel this level of respect for their expertise. This is someone who's doing the process every day. And that really stood out to me.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, that's a great turn of phrase, that “aura of respect for the team member.” I posted something on LinkedIn the other day. There was an article in HealthLeaders Media, and it said, “Being human, healthcare staff often find it overwhelming to simply maintain the status quo, much less drive improvements in care… even in organizations that are open to changes, there's no time to identify or act on even the simplest improvements.” And I think, wow, that's a fairly typical culture.
Jess Orr:
Yeah, I think that that's very unfortunate and fundamentally disrespectful. We run into that sometimes in a culture where we view the frontline staff as a set of hands. And you forget that every human comes with a mind, too, and no one understands that process or that machine the way that person who's operating it day in and day out does. The quickest way to shut down a continuous improvement effort is to say, “We don't have time to implement employee ideas.” The operators get excited, they'll be saying, “I've been complaining about this for years, and you actually listened to me and you did something about it.” I think that might have an impact on productivity when they feel like they're actually being listened to.
Saving 200 Jobs Through Employee Engagement
Mark Graban:
So let's transition a little bit to working outside of Toyota now. There's a blog post that you wrote for me on Lean Blog that I really recommend, titled, “How 200 Jobs Were Saved by Engaging Employees in Continuous Improvement.” Can you tee up that story?
Jess Orr:
Yeah, I wrote about the struggle I had with leaving Toyota and moving into another culture. I was spoiled at Toyota. It was like working in a well-oiled machine. But I remember going up to an operator at a machine one day early in my new role and asking, “Can I look at your standard work?” He looked at me with this blank look on his face, and I realized, “Oh, he doesn't have standard work for his process.” It was very jarring.
But then I started to slowly realize that my time at Toyota was really an investment in me, and moving outside of Toyota, I saw that it was my role to invest in others now. And that was a big transition in my career.
Mark Graban:
So, what was the situation? Why were these jobs at risk?
Jess Orr:
It started when I got a call from one of our vice presidents. He said, “Jess, I need your help. We have a facility that we're thinking about shutting down.” This facility, I knew it had struggled for a long time with productivity, and morale there was… it was a tough situation. The customer contract was coming to a close. And he said, “I think that we owe it to the people there to go in and give it one last shot, and I'd like you to lead that effort.”
I remember hanging up the phone and just putting my head in my hands because I knew that capable people had already gone into that facility and tried to help, and the results hadn't sustained. I realized that there was probably a high likelihood that this was going to fail as well, and just feeling the weight of the 200 people at that facility.
So the first thing I did is I went to see the site. And what I found, it was chaos. They were scrambling to get orders out on time. There was a lot of firefighting, lack of basic 5S, things all over the floor, no organization. The thing that struck me the most was just how beaten down everyone was. For three years, they hadn't been performing well, and they knew it, and they were working as hard as they could. It was heartbreaking. But I could tell, talking with the people, that they were very motivated. They wanted to get better, they just didn't know how.
Mark Graban:
So how do you decide what to focus on? Where do you even start?
Jess Orr:
I knew that if we were going to stand a chance of succeeding, we were going to have to engage every one of those 200 people. The first thing that we did is we formed a steering team, people representative of every department in the plant. One of the defining moments was one of our first meetings. I'm always very passionate about, “Let's start with why.” I asked them, “Why are we here?” And they said, “Well, we need to get our numbers up.” And I said, “No, that's not why we're here. How about this? I think we're here to ensure security for our jobs, ourselves, and our families.” And I saw the light go on in their eyes.
I said, “I'm going to set another goal for you. I think you're going to become the top-performing site in the division.” They just looked at me with their mouths open. I said, “No, I think you can do it, because I can tell that this is a highly capable group of people.” Setting that vision as our true north really had an impact.
We invested some time in coaching the leaders. We were very fortunate; we had a new general manager at the site who was a servant leader at her heart. We had everybody do Gemba walks every day. We coached them: “We're going out to look for problems and we're going to look for ways that we can help people fix those problems.” I remember going out with the ops manager, and I said, “Every time we encounter a piece of trash, you and I are going to pick it up.” And that act itself was symbolic to the employees, saying, “No, we're in this together.”
From Problems to Solutions
Mark Graban:
And so in that process of inspiring others, what types of ideas did you see come forward that were helping solve this situation?
Jess Orr:
That was the other aspect of the Gemba walks: we would go out with the purpose of finding problems but also actively soliciting people's ideas. One thing that struck me–so 5S toolboards can sometimes get a bad rap. I didn't want to go in, even though it was pretty clear to me that that's what they needed. So I was talking with a supervisor one day, and I said, “Yeah, it looks like you guys are spending a lot of time trying to find tools.” And she goes, “Yeah, we are.” I kind of said, “What do you think might be a way that we could make sure each line has their own tools?” And she's like, “I think we just need a tool center set up at each line.”
So it was her idea. Instead of just going out and having the boards built, we actually brought her and a couple of line leaders into a room with all the tools they would need. I said, “I want you guys to lay out the toolboard on this conference room table.” They laid it out, and then we bought a couple of toolboards and said, “I want you guys to build it.” They actually had two different layouts, so we had this fun event where we had everyone in the plant vote on their favorite layout because we wanted to standardize it across the lines. But that was a neat way to really engage them and say, “Hey, it's your toolboard. What do you want it to look like?”
Mark Graban:
And there's so much to love about that story. What I hear you saying is that you were oriented around solving problems and making work easier for people. You weren't manipulating people; you were just helping them see.
Jess Orr:
Right, exactly. When I had that conversation with the supervisor, I was detached from the solution. If she had told me that this wasn't a problem or she had a different way she wanted to approach it, I would have let it go.
But one of my favorite stories of getting employee ideas: we had a particularly difficult product to build. We decided we were going to run a workshop. We got some of the associates and line leaders in to figure out how to make this build better. By this time, we had already educated them on some basic Lean manufacturing principles. We laid out the process and asked them, “Okay, where's our bottleneck? How can we make this process better?” And they just took it from there. One person came up with this innovative method to remove trash from the table very quickly, actually creating a hole in the table with a trash can underneath it. Very simple, but none of us had thought of it before.
They had about 10 different improvements, and they're running their trial on the line. I realized at one point, I could walk away from this event right now and they wouldn't even notice. At that point, I realized that they were running the event, and it was just the best feeling. At the end, one of the supervisors said, “Jess, it was great that you kind of got us started, but I think I could probably run the next event by myself.” And I was like, “All right, that's a win.”
Mark Graban:
And that's a sign of culture change. Your role was going to shift and evolve as you developed them to be a little more self-sufficient.
Jess Orr:
Right, exactly. My role is a little unique in that I'm a practitioner that goes to sites. But I always like to say my goal is to get them to a point where they don't need me anymore.
Mark Graban:
So, when did you start seeing results? When did leaders decide that the jobs were saved?
Jess Orr:
There were some subjective results that I started to see first. I remember during one of my final Gemba walks, I was out with the ops manager and could not find a single piece of trash on the floor. I also noticed that people were actively approaching leaders with ideas. We had this one supervisor who, at the beginning of the effort, was just kind of apathetic. They hit their production numbers one day, so I went up to him, patted him on the shoulder, and said, “Just great job today.” And he looks at me and he goes, “Thank you. But we left a lot on the table, and we're going to get it tomorrow.” That to me was just a sign that the culture had really shifted.
The end result, it didn't happen right away, took a couple of months, but we started to see the metrics improve. They kept improving month over month, more gain than they had seen in the previous three years. And the leadership did make the decision to keep the plant open, which was just so rewarding to hear. I like to tell people, “Those 200 people did this.” And I completely believe that. It was the result that we were hoping for, and it really was because we focused on the right process of engaging the people.
The Lean Journey as a Safari
Mark Graban:
A story like that just goes to show Lean is one of the greatest ways to protect jobs and to improve quality and to grow the company. It's a shame when people, because of their experiences and mindsets, can't look to Lean as something positive.
Jess Orr:
One of the things, and I think I heard you mention this recently, is this whole idea about “implementing Lean,” as if there's a discrete start and a discrete finish to it. I struggle with that a lot. Someone described this on Gemba Academy's podcast recently, and he said, “You know, Lean is not something you implement.” We've often heard people say it's a journey, but he took it a step further and he said, “You know, it's a safari.” And I was like, that's great because you don't know what you're going to encounter. You're going to have to pivot and adapt.
When I first started my new role, my manager, who's really become one of my most trusted mentors, she suggested that at the beginning of every effort, instead of going in with, “All right, here's the results we want,” she said, “Just go in and ask them where their pain points are.” Because she said, “Their pain points are going to lead you to those process improvements that are going to get you the results you want.” And when you go into these efforts and you just start by asking people, “So what frustrates you at work?” the shift in the reactions that you get is just remarkable.
Mark Graban:
I like that safari analogy. Though, I sure would hope if I was going on a safari that I have a guide who does know to some extent what's going to happen.
Jess Orr:
Right, yeah, absolutely. You want to leverage employee ideas, but you're also kind of the guardian of the process. You want to make sure that they're going about it the right way. So you kind of wear a couple of different hats. You're the facilitator, but sometimes you're also the teacher, teaching them about a specific process or a method. And then sometimes you're also a coach, so sometimes you have to go in and challenge them a little bit. It's this balance of engaging the people but also giving them the support and the guidance they need.
Mark Graban:
I'm curious about your thoughts on this. When you talk about this balance, respect doesn't mean we automatically say yes to everything everyone wants to do. Sometimes it means we challenge, but we can do that in a respectful way, right?
Jess Orr:
Yeah, absolutely. It is a balance. There are times where I'll have to push back on a team. They'll come up with an improvement idea that either costs a lot of money or involves a department that's outside of their control. And I'll challenge them. I'll say, “No, we're going to focus on what we can improve here.” So I'm kind of letting them color inside the lines, but it helps set the lines of what are we going to focus on. But it is a tricky balance to maintain.
Mark Graban:
That's why we're all still practicing.
Jess Orr:
Right. Anytime you call yourself an expert, you're in a dangerous place. Because there's just so much to learn about continuous improvement and Lean that I don't think any of us can say that we're experts. We're still on that safari of discovery, if you will.
Mark Graban:
Well, Jess, I've really enjoyed you sharing your stories and perspectives here. I'll give you an opportunity to share maybe a final thought. Where can people find you and connect with you online?
Jess Orr:
Yeah, absolutely. If there's one thing that I've learned from this effort that I would share with other people, it's to trust the process. There were times it was like wandering through fog working on this project. I didn't know the outcome. Success was not a guarantee; failure was likely. And I really had to trust that this process and these principles would work. And I do believe that when you focus on the process, using the results to evaluate and adjust the process as needed, it will, in most cases, lead to the results that you want. So I would just encourage people, do trust the process.
In terms of reaching me, I'm on LinkedIn, Jess Orr, J-E-S-S O-R-R. I also have a website that's a platform for sharing best practices. That one's called Yokoten Learning, Y-O-K-O-T-E-N learning dot com. And then you can reach me by email at jess@yokotenlearning.com.
Mark Graban:
Well, great. I hope people will go and do that. Again, our guest today has been Jess Orr. Jess, again, thank you for doing the podcast, building upon the blog posts, and giving a lot more color and insight to those experiences. I really appreciate it.
Jess Orr:
Thank you, Mark. I appreciate this opportunity to share a little bit about these experiences. And thank you as well for all that you're doing for the continuous improvement community.
Mark Graban:
Well, thank you.
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