The e-mail trap!
E-mails are a death trap for improvements. Read the article why...
Although e-mail looks like an accessible mean to invoke improvements in your (production) processes, as it turns out, e-mail is more often an early killer of well meant initiatives.
In most cases workfloor staff see opportunities for improvement but lack the means to execute them. So the only thing they can do is report an improvement suggestion by means of an e-mail to management. Either this is a single person or a group of involved people.
In case of a single person it turns out that these kind of e-mails are mostly simply removed from the inbox or marked as low-priority.
To prevent the scenario above, as a redundancy measure the same e-mail is send to several people at once.
Since e-mail software does not contain a strict workflow for improvement suggestions, it now becomes unclear who is responsible for follow-up.
This means the workfloor staff has to keep track of their proposals! Facilitating the workfloor to create an optimal environment for workfloor staff to flourish in, is an absolute core task for operational management!
To ensure follow-up of any observation and/or suggestion from the staff stop using e-mail for this communication purpose and start using a continuous improvement toolkit!
