UNTRAINING™ EXAMPLES & APPLICATIONS

Issues

• Remote work group issues

Our client’s management established the off-site Engineering team to help them avoid losing productivity working on new products by being dragged into endless meetings regarding issues with current product manufacturing. Some members of the Engineering group liked moving off-site while others felt removed from the “heartbeat” of the company. Those who yearned to be back at HQ spent a significant part of their work week driving the 45-minute distance between the Engineering center and HQ, whether they really needed to or not.

Our 3-Week Solution

Our coaches embedded with the off-site Engineering group for 3 weeks. We joined Status meetings, Product Reviews, Customer Development meetings, and small work groups as the engineers worked together. We saw how some parts of the off-site Engineering group worked well and others didn’t. We joined on several of the drives back to HQ to learn what the engineers did back at HQ.

We learned first-hand how this group was over-run by demands from a wide variety of people at HQ – Operations, Purchasing, Finance, Field Service, Sales – and how being off-site turned out to be a greater loss in productivity than anticipated. We witnessed the conflicts, name-calling, tempers and us/them mentality raising to a boil.

Since the entire purpose of setting up the off-site group was productivity, we figured we’d appeal to the engineers’ left-brain wiring with a request: we asked each member of the Engineering group to track his or her actual hours spent working on new product development. Being engineers, they created spreadsheets for what they called Time Tracking Tourniquet.

In the second week, we called “time outs” when any of these non-productive behaviors arose, our coaches helped address issues on the spot. That brought tempers down and we held an Idea Lab to solicit ideas from the group for how they thought things could work better.

One idea got everyone talking and increasingly got the group energized – setting a daily 1-hour window when all the engineers would be available for anyone at HQ using Microsoft Teams. The more the group talked about this, the more everyone added to the idea, the better the idea became, as did the cohesion of the group.

We implemented the Teams idea the third week, and while everyone seemed more boisterous, we discovered a few significant results comparing the Time Tracking week 1 vs. week 3  –

• Productive time spent working on new product designs increased 40% from 195 hours to 270 hours (group total); less than half the group’s total time (440 hours) was originally dedicated to doing the work
• Time spent with people at HQ decreased from 110 hours to 52 hours
• Non-productive time, like dealing with conflicts, clarifying communications and unnecessary meetings, decreased from 65 hours to 15 hours
• The group collectively dedicated 70 hours with customers, something no one reported in the original time tracking

Results

The company benefitted with customers excited by the new attention from the Engineering Group, earning 2 new contracts worth about $3M. The Engineering team is excited and proud.