For those of you who have not experienced the Elf’s power it is all stems from the tradition of a Georgia family who had a small elf that reported the children’s behavior to Santa every night and would come back home and sit in a different location every day. The matron of the family recorded this in story book form and the rest is history. Now kids are controlled by the little cloth elf from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve. Now on to the previous question, do you have an "Elf on a Shelf" in Your Facility? Do you have something that reminds everyone to do the good things every time they see it? The good things may be focusing on improvements you are trying to make around reliability practices, precision maintenance, operational procedures, quality or others. What do you have that keeps these improvements in the mind’s eye of the folks in your site? Does it reinforce the goals of your business? Some facilities use symbols, slogans, logos and characters. Others use metrics boards, electronic OEE marquees, and other real time metrics displays. I don’t want to argue the merits of the methods, however we do know it is crucial to find ways to remind everyone that the elf is watching and we have to do our best every day to remain competitive in this economy.
So what is the Elf on a Shelf in your facility?
I would love to hear what has worked for your site and what you would not use again.
The best thing I've seen is a daily habit of paying attention to ____ (fill in the blank with whatever behavior you want to reinforce). For example, maybe you want to reinforce the behavior of completing all assigned work orders and making sure there's a work order for all break-in work.
ReplyDeleteThe first "elf on the shelf" would be cruising the work areas to check in with craft during the day. Then, at the end of the day, every day, asking which scheduled work orders have been completed and reviewing work orders written to cover unscheduled work, with the expectation that the un-pencil-whipped total will be in the vicinity of 7 hours. Knowing the conversation is coming is an "elf-on-the-shoulder," all day long.