HT Whiteboard: Creating Short-Term Wins (Step 6)
Posted on July 12, 2022 | in Ergonomics
VelocityEHS’ James Mallon explains step 6 from John Kotter’s Book, “Leading Change”.
Video Transcript
Hi, this is Jamie Mallon with Humantech (now VelocityEHS Ergonomics) back with another installment of “HT Whiteboard.” As you recall, we’re reviewing this book called Leading Change, and in that book, we’re talking about how to lead a transformation process. Step six is how to generate short-term wins and the importance of those short-term wins. If you think about it in your organization, you’re going to find people who really support you, and then you’re going to find some people that resist what you’re trying to accomplish. The purpose of short-term wins is to reward those people who’ve been working hard alongside you and get them to feel a sense of accomplishment. It also aims to move these resistors onto your side and get them to start to support your process.
For a short-term win to be valuable, it has to be visible to a large proportion of your organization. A lot of people got to see it, a lot of people got to be impacted by it. Secondly, it has to be unambiguous. There can be no doubt that it’s a win. It has to have a big impact so people can see it. And third, it has to be clearly related to what you’re doing. Very, very key that it has to be related, in our case, to ergonomics.
One of the things that we see in many implementations is that people want to assess all of their jobs to understand where their priorities might be. You’ve got to think about that in smaller chunks. It takes a long time to assess every job in your plant, but you know where those problems are. So, my recommendation is to pick ten, do a risk assessment on them, and then get those fixes in place so that people can start to feel your change effort. If you do that, you’re going to be well on your way to gaining success and getting more and more supporters and starting to embed your process.
So that is a quick video on short-term wins. Hope you enjoyed it. Look forward to talking to you soon. Bye now.