Give employees the freedom to be creativeīAU involves streamlining processes, improving workflows, and eliminating unnecessary or redundant steps throughout the organization. It is an ongoing culture of continuous improvement that enables organizations to gain efficiency and eliminate waste in every department - from manufacturing to supply chain management to customer service. Embrace a culture of continuous improvementīAU is not a project with a definitive beginning, middle, and end. The following three best practices will ensure that your BAU/LSS initiatives improve productivity and avoid waste. However, for LSS practices to bear the fruits intended, a company must have top-notch leadership in place. Implementing successful LSS projects helps accomplish all of that and more. They want to reduce costs, enhance efficiency, and change their corporate culture. 3 best practices when thinking about business as usualĬompanies’ leaders are always looking to step up their game. They not only failed to innovate, but also to evolve. There is no shortage of testament to this fact: Kodak, Blockbuster Video, Blackberry Motion, Circuit City, Macy’s, Borders Bookstore, Hitachi, and Polaroid are just a few of the many examples of companies that were once giants in their respective industries. The BAU mentality is a dangerous place to linger too long, because as industry examples have shown us over time, the fallout can be costly and permanent. After all, if you’re doing just fine, why bother? But if there are problems that need fixing, you need to understand them before you can fix them. Understanding what your company’s BAU looks like allows you to accurately evaluate whether or not a change is needed. Why is it important to understand business as usual? Because there’s less accountability, people stop paying attention to details, and things start slipping through the cracks. Less accountability, more mistakesįinally, falling into a BAU mindset can create a dangerous cycle of operating on autopilot: When it’s BAU at your company, there’s less accountability because everyone knows what’s expected of them, and they’ve done it over and over again. If your company’s focus is always on getting through the day-to-day routine instead of innovating or improving things, your employees might start feeling uninspired or even bored by their jobs. Your employees are likely motivated by more than just showing up for work - they want to feel like they’re contributing something meaningful, and they want to feel like their work matters. Loss of employee engagementĪnother disadvantage is that you run the risk of losing employee engagement when you’re more focused on BAU than customer satisfaction. What worked in the past might not work in the future, and if you have a BAU mentality, you might not be flexible enough to adapt your company’s practices to the changing times. One of the main disadvantages to BAU is that it doesn’t promote change, and change is necessary to keep up with an ever-evolving marketplace. By working from our current baseline, we run the risk of falling back into what has worked in the past and eventually failing at reaching our LSS initiatives and goals. 3 drawbacks to business as usualīAU is the enemy of continuous improvement and cannot be an option if you want to truly become a LSS organization. BAU doesn’t lead to growth in the organization, and management cannot rely on it for long-term benefits. financial, but does little to harness the innovative power of LSS. BAU may prove efficient and effective from one specific standpoint, i.e. It means fulfilling requirements in ways that do not utilize LSS tools or methodologies. In a nutshell, it is the traditional way of executing a business in a LSS environment. In terms of LSS methodology, BAU has influenced how organizations are structured by serving as a baseline from which to measure improvement through continuous process improvement initiatives. It is the status quo - the standard operations or procedures routinely used - for a business and represents the generally accepted way that things are done by those in the organization. Overview: What is business as usual?īAU is the system that is currently in place for a company prior to implementing any sort of change to improve it or make it more efficient. This article will explain how to use the concept to engage your team and ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to executing lean initiatives. Perhaps, however, you aren’t sure what it actually means, or how to apply it to daily work life. If you’re familiar with Lean Six Sigma (LSS), you’ve probably heard of this concept before.
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