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Benefits Visual Management

Visual Management, A Magic at Workplace

In present scenario, every individual is spending around 60-70% of his/her time viewing various visuals either on computer/laptop screen or on mobile phone screen. Visual memory is many times effective than auditory memory. We all are experiencing the magic of visual management every now and then.

Let’s take an example. Mr. Joseph is a workman at assembly department. Company wants him to get trained on assembly operations. There are 2 ways of communicating the assembly instructions to Mr. Joseph.

  • Training/teaching at shop floor
  • Assembly work instructions in local language displayed on board.

It is obvious that Mr. Joseph is comfortable viewing the work instructions in 5 minutes rather than someone explaining him & spending almost 30 minutes. In case of displayed work instructions, there are many other benefits as compared to one-time training at shop floor. Benefits are listed below.

  • Availability: Pictorial work instructions are available for 24 x 7 throughout the year. Mr. Joseph can view it as many times till he is well conversant and expert in the operations.
  • Easy Modifications: Any changes in assembly operations can be easily communicated by modifying the work instruction.
  • Minute Details: The minute details can be covered while designing the work instructions which may not be every time possible through training on shop floor.
  • Standardization: The work instruction can be displayed at multiple places which may be found difficult in case of training physically on site.
  • Cost Effectiveness: The displayed work instruction is a cost effective solution rather than conducting multiple trainings.

Visual management is an effective media of communication by means of images, color’s and minimal text. Exclusive displays at appropriate locations at the workplace always bring in better culture towards Quality, Productivity & Safety performance enhancement. The displays at the workplace can be work instructions, standard operating procedures, policies, are identification boards, safety signs, safety posters on quality, productivity & safety, analytical boards, performance dash boards etc. All such effective displays offer following benefits at the workplace.

Benefits of Visual Management:
  • Cultural enhancement at the company
  • Awareness and clarity on Quality, Productivity & Safety specifications
  • Better presentation to customers and visitors.

The concept of “Visual Factory” is receiving recognition and appreciation by many good companies and corporates.

Visualmitra LLP, Mumbai based company is instrumental in creating awareness on visual management across industry more than a decade. Their services right from identifying the appropriate display to the actual installation at the workplace are appreciated by many OEMs and MNCs. Visual management is found to be effective media of communication irrespective of the size, nature and location of the organization. Let’s build the better industrial culture by means of effective visuals at shop floor.

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Benefits Fascility Visual Management Uncategorized Visual Management

5 Key Benefits of Effective Visual Management

Visual management is trending in manufacturing and logistics business units. But what is the reason behind this trend? Well, it is certainly due to the benefits that effective visual management provides. Here are 5 of them.

1. Provides Transparency

Management often complain that there is a lack of transparency in their teams. Due to readily available information today, transparency is now just a basic expectation of employees. By displaying work visually, it makes it easily accessible, but more importantly it sends a powerful message of openness and trust.

2. Fosters Psychological safety

When work is shared so openly, teams feel safer to be vulnerable with one another. As per Google’s 2015 research it is referred to as psychological safety and drives high performance amongst teams. It certainly helps team members to share their difficulties when they see that problems are not something to be ashamed of but something to be openly discussed and solved.

3. It Increases Accountability

An obvious outcome of transparency is an increased level of accountability. Of course, if you want collaborative accountability then team goals are the best way to go. For an example, a visual management board for sales department can act as a motivational force for all team members to act and own the outcome as they get to see their team target for the week and the shortfall.

4. Reduces Risk

Another least known or observed benefit of effective visual management is its ability to help with risk management. When all the work is visible and accessible easily, teams and leaders can try resolving issues early and there is reduced possibility of overlooking those errors or issues.

A work flow board is a most common method to understand the status or progress within teams and processes. With effective implementation of visual management projects, it is clear when tasks don’t move as expected, which may have implications to the fate of a project-a success or a failure.

5. Greater Team Alignment

In any organizations teams are bombarded with many complex priorities. With the help of visual management tool, it can get one or many teams on the same page in lesser time. Depending on the department and tasks, this could reflect as basic ‘Focus of the day’ or your major objectives for a given quarter. When this occurs, teams make decisions that contribute to accomplishing the same outcomes.

Management gurus strongly believe that effective visual management can provide key benefits for their teams. One must keep in mind that every team will have different needs, goals and contexts and therefore requires the right implementation.

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Benefits Fascility Visual Management Visual Management

The Magic of Visual Management At Workplace

Visual Management is one of the essential tools that we make use of at our work and home lives that you may not have even noticed. But once you understand what visual management exactly is all about, you’ll be seeing it everywhere!

Visual management is a tool that is used for lean management for making the work culture of that place better. A visual management technique makes use of effective visual displays to convey a certain message in an efficient and effective manner with minimum efforts. These visual displays can be are as follows:-

1] Data Displays like informative boards, performance white boards, safety calendars, MIS reports etc.
2] Guiding tools like floor marking tapes, stickers and area identification boards, signboards etc.
3] Shape cutouts for easy identification of the designated place of a tool,instrument or an equipment.
4] Flowcharts and layouts like work flow instructions, standard operating procedure (SOP), First In First Out (FIFO) layout etc.
Awareness posters like safety posters, Motivational posters, Posters for International quality management techniques, Business excellence posters etc.

Effects of Visual management at a workplace

Visual management exhibits crystal clear transparency and eliminates the distance between the higher management and production floor level of workers. Information is not hidden at any given point, and the whole organization is united on the same success goals. This forms unity and team spirit among all the the employees.

Many lean management techniques and principles rely on visual management that includes floor marking tapes to the large visual display boards and performance boards, sign boards etc. Visual management acts as the key sustaining force for many well-known lean techniques like 5S, standard work, total productive maintenance (TPM), Gemba walk and Kanban. It involves many visual indications that help to create a better work environment.

It suggests the use of different colors and labels to mark each item in the workplace differently. Labeling and marking gauges, oil levels and lube levels are all examples of visual controls that help the employees to easily detect abnormalities at a glance thereby promoting preventive maintenance and reducing the production down time.

Visual management is not just making data and metrics visible on a wall, it is a real-time visual display of the data that allows the team to take immediate actions to solve issues or support the production process. It thus promotes constant monitoring of the data and taking immediate actions accordingly.

The safety visuals help to make people aware of the possible hazards and situations within the work environment. It is very necessary to define the location of hazards as well as location of safe aids like first aid station, and location for personal protection equipment, Safety shower, eye wash station etc. Safety signs and safety instructions also plays an important role in accident prevention.

Benefits of visual management at a workplace

• Sharing all the Information with others to avoid any miscommunication
• Communicating the standards to attain uniformity throughout the processes.
• Implementing the standards to maintain smooth running of the processes.
• Bringing attention to irregularities in the processes for further action to be taken.
• Taking immediate actions against the irregularities when they happen to avoid such instances in future.
• Preventing such Irregularities from taking place for nonstop high quality output.

Fun facts about visual learners.

• 80% of people remember what they see or do rather than what the read or hear
• 65% of the world’s population are visual learners.
• 40% of human nerve fibers are linked to the retina.
• Humans are capable of getting the approximate understanding of a visual scene in less than 1/10th of a second.
• An average human eye can register up to 36,000 visual messages every hour.
• All the emotions and the visual information are processed in the same part of the human brain.
• Human brain processes visual information 60,000 times quicker than audio and written information.

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Benefits Fascility Visual Management

Visual Management – It’s All About the Benefits

This blog explains what a team should expect after implementing visual management. In Visual Management, most important part is “Why” before digging too much into the “How.” That way, when the going gets tough, we have a reason to follow through on the effort. Benefits can really be broken down into two areas: the hard, measurable benefits, and the soft, cultural benefits. First, the measurable:

Measurable Benefits of Visual Management

“That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.”– Karl Pearson

Adding to that when team members understand how their individual work impacts the process, real, sustainable improvement begins. By linking together the work of individual team members with the team’s tactical targets, and aligning those with the company’s overall objectives, magic happens. We have personally witnessed countless examples of this principle play out within both manufacturing and office settings. There is something magical about displaying current vs. target condition in real-time.

There are multiple reasons for this:
1] Team members understand what you care about most-you as an employer could have measured any metric, but you chose this one so it must be important!
2] Display it on the wall-this targets few items, typically personal and team pride in terms of ownership, a natural desire to do better than previous day
3] People desire to win- In every organisation, even semi-engaged team members show up to work every day desiring to do a good job. Now, you’ve provided a medium of measuring what a “better work” looks like
4] My hard work matters-as mentioned above, team members that are able to connect their individual decision-making and output to the overall team performance are dangerous, in a very good way

Visual management project implementation as part of your Lean Management System can be difficult, but the measurable, tangible benefits of the effort are many.

Cultural Benefits of Visual Management implementation

In an age where data-driven reporting and results-oriented management strategies are becoming the expected norm, it can be easy to forget about the relational and cultural health of your organization. The purpose of visual management is a far cry from trying to marginalise individuals and promote bottom line metrics at all costs. In fact, visual management and Lean ideology is based on a ‘deep respect for people’. Below are three of the impacts on your team culture you will observe after implementing visual management:

Unity

An unfortunate truth is that in many organizations, the relationship between manager and employee is one of constant tension, disagreement, and frustration. Over time, this starts to create a ‘managers vs. employees’ mindset where managers are after one thing and employees are working in different direction. If left unchecked, this mindset actually breeds all kinds of organizational waste. When leadership and team members are not aligned and are not excited about the same things, it results into an ineffective team.

Visualmitra actually provides a unique solution to this cultural problem by supplying a shared view, visible to everyone in form of Informative boards, Performance improvement board which is used to report in real-time how the team as one unit is doing. This ‘scoreboard’ is allowing the team to be privy to the same information at the same time, and make decisions in one accord.

Visualmitra custom designed visual management displays will start to point out problems in the process and not problems with people. When an entire team starts dancing to the same tune, and everyone can agree on what success looks like, any employer will find high level of sense of unity within the team.

Alignment of Vision

Similar to unity within a team, it is very common for members at different levels of an organization to have different goals for the company and the personal role they play. Many times the vision and mission of higher management doesn’t reach to the ears of front line employees. In this ‘telephone’ game where we expect vision and mission to be carried on through a conversation the CEO had with the Manager, and the Manager had with the Supervisor, and the Supervisor had with the Employees. Somewhere along the way things are going to get lost and people are not going to be operating on a shared vision.

Visual management provides a transparent information flow which constantly communicates the vision, objectives, and priorities of leadership to everyone, regardless of their job profile. When employees are aware of the metrics are being displayed and driving their day to day work are coming directly from leadership, it boasts their confidence and provide a sense that their work is valuable and important to an organization. Engaged Workforce

As you start to recognise more unity and shared vision across your organization, you will see that employees at all levels are becoming more engaged with their work and feel empowered to identify and solve problems.

As per the Gallup research, keeping employees happy or satisfied is worth to help build inspiring workplace. Just measuring employee satisfaction or happiness levels is not sufficient to create sustainable change, retain star employees, and improve the bottom line. Satisfied or happy employees are not always engaged ones. Engaged employees are committed and hard working ones.

If you’re engaged, you know employer’s expectations form your work and you feel connected with your teammates, and you want to be there. An employee has a feeling of being a part of something significant, which reflects into a want to be part of a solution, to be part of a bigger tribe. All of that results into positive performance consequences for teams and organisation.

In other words, employees who know what is expected of them become more engaged. When you start to feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself, it’s empowering, energising, and you will desire to do your part and add value to the whole. Visual management becomes a vital tool for always letting employees know what is expected of them. As more and more of your workforce becomes engaged with their work, morale will skyrocket and the atmosphere will become attractive to everyone on the team.

Successful visual management implementation has clear benefits creating inspiring cultures, and when you add those benefits to the significant improvement in the actual processes being measured, implementing visuals as part of your Lean Management is a win-win situation for an organisation and employees too.