What do OEE improvement and the gym have in common?

• They both involve training people to carry out activities which in the short term they may not understand or even enjoy with the intention of realising a longer term beneficial outcome – be it less downtime, or the ability to walk up the stairs without running out of breath.

So to explain how this is relevant let me take you through the process that most good quality gyms will take you through when you join:

Your Gym Fitness Instructor:

• You meet an instructor who chats about why you’re there, helps you to identify your desired outcomes, and helps you to create a rough plan of your objectives.
• The instructor takes you to the first machine. Tells you what it does and how it works. The instructor then gets on the machine and demonstrates some repetitions
• You get on the machine and repeat what the instructor did. The instructor coaches and guides you till they’re happy you can repeat without them.
• Repeat for each machine on your programme.
• At the end of the tour the instructor checks that you’re happy, completes your plan with you, and tells you when they’ll review progress.
• Some time in the next couple of weeks the instructor catches up with you and reviews progress. Helps you with any difficulties and may fine tune the programme.
• Final review and programme tweak for the next stage

Your Traditional Manufacturing Manager:

• You need to do this because it’s in your objectives/we have to meet an order/we’re in the brown stuff.
• Do you understand?
• Yes brilliant, get on with it come to me if you have a problem.
• Review…hmmm our OEE is still the same. Why aren’t we getting the results that we want? Must be something wrong with………(start listing excuses here).
  

Be honest – is your method of getting your team to act differently more like example 1 or example 2?

What would be the impact on our teams if we were to spend more time as OEE Fitness Instructors and less time as managers?