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Six Sigma Communications
Six Sigma Communications: The Missing Link in Your Six Sigma Training Strategy?
By Doug Gorman
You are the Chief Learning Officer at XYZ Company. You are implementing Six Sigma and you’re ready. You’ve gone to the experts, talked to vendors, and put together a training strategy that should have your new Black Belts, Green Belts, Master Black Belts, Champions, and managers up and running in no time.
Not only will the teams be trained in Six Sigma methods and statistical techniques, but they will also get training in project management, business analysis, and team building. You’ve looked at mentoring, staff development, and change management, and have built these elements into your training programs as well.
Months go by. The VP of Manufacturing for Asia Region receives a 3-inch binder with the title “Six Sigma Recommendations.” He scans the report, can’t find anything interesting and gets interrupted by his Director of Quality who says that Line A is down. The report sits on the VP’s desk for a week and then gets moved to a bookshelf. Two months later the COO calls him, “I just got a report from the CFO that says that your plants have ignored one of the critical Six Sigma recommendations outlined in the report that you got a long time ago. The CEO is furious, because it looks like we aren’t serious about change.” He wants to know why the VP of Manufacturing ignored the report.
In reality, the recommendation was hidden within the binder. It was presented in a way that would have taken him days to figure out and longer to implement. And to understand it, he would have had to also “understand” dozens of other recommendations that he would have found were totally irrelevant to his area. He had tried scanning the document and had wanted to find the information that could help, but he couldn’t get through the sea of irrelevant information. Had he found it, he also would have found that the recommendations for improvement were not presented in a way that would permit efficient implementation.
So, what could possibly be missing from your Six Sigma training strategy? The chances are you’ve missed one of the most critical success factors for any quality or productivity initiative: communication skills training. Six Sigma, like ISO 9000 and TQM, will fail without a relentless organizational focus on information and communication.
Adding Six Sigma to the Communication Mix
Six Sigma initiatives will require you to significantly increase the quality and quantity of communication within your organization. But let’s face it, most organizations are already struggling with communications that are unfocused and difficult to read, with buried key points in endless lines of irrelevant information. The number of poorly written e-mail messages, reports, and proposals that come across their desks each day already overburdens managers. And workers already have difficulty interpreting all of the complicated policies, processes and procedures they are supposed to follow. Adding Six Sigma ideas, reports, proposals, solutions, project updates, and process changes to the mix will only add to the problem--unless they are presented in a clear, effective way that highlights key points and allows readers to quickly access and understand the information they need.
Adopting organization-wide communication standards, methods, and protocols, and adding communication skills training to the Six Sigma curriculum will help Six Sigma teams communicate and sell their ideas, plans, and solutions internally, will make life easier for overburdened managers, and will substantially increase a project’s likelihood of success.
Communication and the Themes of Six Sigma
According to Six Sigma experts Pande and Holpp in their book “What is SIX SIGMA?” there are six themes of Six Sigma. Each of the themes requires a relentless focus on clear, concise communication.
Theme One: Focus on the Customer
Savvy companies have proven over the past decade that excellence starts with an accurate understanding of customer needs and the ability and commitment to meet those needs. Achieving this objective in a Six Sigma environment requires strong communication with customers, as well as the ability of salespeople, R&D, and marketing to clearly capture and communicate customer needs and desires to others within the organization.
How good is your sales force at accurately describing your product’s features, benefits and implementation process to customers? How good is your sales force at conveying real customer needs back into your Company? How good is your operations group at communicating out to the customer? If you are like most organizations, you’ve spent very little time and effort thinking about how to improve these communications, but a “Focus on the Customer” demands more than “business as usual” communication effectiveness.
Theme Two: Data- and Fact-Driven Management
One of the primary differences between Six Sigma and other quality initiatives is the relentless focus on data. Much of the power of the Six Sigma process comes from its avoidance of speculation and conversation in favor of tests and measurements. Graphs and charts are often touted as the language of Six Sigma – and they are important – but it is equally important that Six Sigma teams wrap their charts and graphs in clear, effective communications that make sense of the data and their interpretations and solutions. This result can only be accomplished if the people preparing the statistics – and their managers – can communicate effectively.
Theme Three: Processes are Where the Action Is
Six Sigma projects usually focus on key processes and how to improve them. In most companies, process, procedure and guideline information is poorly written. Since processes typically involve many departments and many people, even a small change can have a huge impact on an organization. Providing clear, effective communications about what is changing and why is essential to ensuring that project objectives are met and changes are replicated consistently throughout the organization. Providing communication skills training that helps Six Sigma teams and others throughout the organization learn to communicate new policies, processes, and procedures clearly and effectively will help support your Six Sigma initiative and have a positive long-lasting impact on employee performance.
Theme Four: Proactive Management
Six Sigma produces many organizational changes. Obviously, you want the right changes to happen in both evolutionary and revolutionary ways. Change involves various levels of an organization and many different functions. To be successful, the need for change and the type of change needs to be communicated clearly. In short, there needs to be a focus on getting the right information to the right people at the right time in the right form so that they can make good decisions and take effective action. Clear, effective communication is essential to successful change management.
Theme Five: Boundaryless Collaboration
Global corporations have their important activities located throughout the world. Processes often cross-organizational as well as geographic boundaries. Six Sigma’s relentless focus on process and business results forces staff to work together across departments and organizational boundaries. Six Sigma teams are likely to meet challenges and resistance when they enter new territory and inadvertently “step on toes.” Translation can be a key issue. Translation effectiveness and cost is improved with well-structured communication. The written and spoken communication skills of your Six Sigma teams must be strong enough to break down organizational walls or your Six Sigma effort will fail.
Theme Six: Drive for Perfection; Tolerate Failure
It may sound easy to “drive for perfection, but tolerate failure,” but it is not. Failure is tough. It is often complicated and difficult to explain in a non-threatening way. Poor communication around failures lessens the opportunity to prevent the failure from happening again. Teams must be able to clearly communicate what happened, why it happened, and what they can learn from the experience to help ensure that the next project is a success. Once again, without effective communication skills, it can be difficult to survive and thrive in a perfection-driven environment.
ServiceMaster Case Study: Improved Communication Fuels Six Sigma ResultsThe ServiceMaster Company provides various services to residential and commercial customers in the United States where it serves 10.5 million homes and businesses each year. Core service capabilities include lawn care and landscape maintenance, termite and pest control, plumbing, heating and air conditioning maintenance and repair, appliance maintenance and repair, cleaning and furniture maintenance and home warranties. These services are provided through a network of over 5,400 company-owned and franchised service centers and business units. In 2001, ServiceMaster committed to bringing its quality and customer service to a higher level through Six Sigma. “We were service leaders and wanted to continue to lead in our chosen markets” explains John Biedry, Sr.VP of Continuous Improvement and Six Sigma. We saw the opportunity to differentiate our services by improving the processes that touch our customers every day. ServiceMaster’s Six Sigma program is driven by 55 black belts and 6 deployment champions. Their job is to drive each Six Sigma solution across hundreds of locations. Multiple solutions add up to thousands of replications in ServiceMaster and makes for a formidable communications challenge. ServiceMaster was having difficulty actually implementing recommended process changes, because documentation regarding new processes was hard to understand and difficult to use. Staff was frustrated and it was taking too long to realize the expected benefits from process improvement. With CEO support and commitment for the entire effort, ServiceMaster recognized that effective communication was essential for true success. Looking for a solution, ServiceMaster discovered a research-based methodology called Information Mapping that helped authors to analyze, organize and present information so that it was easier to understand and use. ServiceMaster adopted Information Mapping’s methodology as a standard in order to
- increase the speed of replication of process improvement
- enhance the sharing of information across departments and geographies
- improve the ability of our staff to quickly find information and adopt new processes, and
- improve the readability of important documents.
The result has been quicker implementation and a better return on Investment from our Six Sigma program. Information Mapping is now a core element of the black belt training curriculum and has become the standard for ALL Six Sigma solutions that will be communicated to the field.
Conclusion: The Clear Need for a Shared Communications Methodology
Communication and information are endemic to any Six Sigma effort. Communication skills can be learned and must be demanded by all who are a part of the Six Sigma effort.
The grammar-based communication programs you have used unsuccessfully in the past, will fail again. They are just not up to the needs of today’s complex, fast-changing, results-driven world. They are essentially useless as you begin to structure information for online and web-based delivery.
Your organization needs a communications methodology that is comprehensive enough to support your Six Sigma initiatives and that can be shared across the organization. You need to bring your organization’s communication to Six Sigma levels. If your organization sends a hundred thousand communications (memos, reports, emails) throughout the organization in a month and you are at one sigma level of errors in your written communication, then two thirds of those communications have mistakes, clearly a major problem for your company.
By training Six Sigma teams to use a replicable writing standard, methodology, and best practices for developing high-performance communications, you can help writers
- develop information with the readers’ needs in mind
- communicate key points clearly and concisely
- present complex information so it is clear, effective, and easy to use, and
- convey the right information to readers when and how they need it.
Our experience, as well as numerous research studies, has shown that structured communications yields the measurable results that Six Sigma efforts demand.
Results Benefiting Readers
Researchers and client studies have reported the following results benefiting readers:
- 32% increase in accuracy in retrieval
- 10-50% decrease in reading time
- 13%-83% improvement in initial learning, and
- 57% decrease in number of words in documents.
Results Benefiting Writers
Researchers and client studies have reported the following results benefiting writers:
- 83% decrease in first draft development time
- 75% decrease in document revision time, and
- 20-50% increase in writer productivity.
Results Benefiting Organizations
Researchers and client studies have reported the following results benefiting organizations:
- 10%-50% decrease in training time
- 20%-50% decrease in documentation costs
- 38% increase in documentation use
- 54% decrease in performance error rates
- 70% decrease in questions to supervisors
- 25% improvement in compliance rates, and
- 80% decrease in call volume.
This saves significant money and provides better utilization of scarce resources.
Charge to CLOs
As CLO, you are responsible for improving communication skills so that your Six Sigma initiative will work.
The Six Sigma team needs to adopt a communications methodology that
- communicates problems and opportunities related to existing process
- communicates the new way of doing things so that implementation actually occurs
- communicates within the team and to upper management
- communicates across organizational boundaries, and
- communicates consistently.
Building communication skills training into your Six Sigma communications strategy will help ensure the success of your organization’s Six Sigma initiative. It will also drive better communication skills throughout your organization and pay dividends long after the Six Sigma focus has moved on to the next problem or opportunity.
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