It is common for a team to have one “bottleneck” station or for someone to appear looking ineffective. However, with poor system and poor standards, everyone will take a turn looking bad. It is not the person yet the system that is the issue.

The goal is to establish an agreed upon set of work procedures incorporating best practices into the workflow as a starting point to improving the collective performance of the team​. This will help improve performance, productivity and enhance cross training ability. Reducing variation will drive performance improvements for everybody.

The first LEAN component of creating standard work is to organize the work area. This will facilitate the assessment of workflow and performance to identify training opportunities to raise the team standards to ultimately improve productivity. Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are part of this process yet only optimize the team member in that position. A whole new level is achieved by incorporating best practices into the workflow to improve the collective performance of the team. As the standard is improved, the new standard becomes the baseline for further improvements and the foundation for continuous improvement.

For leadership, standard work includes: the business “true north”, assessing the people, hiring and training the right people, getting out to the work area to see how work is being done and mentoring individuals while holding everyone accountable to performance metrics.