Transcript: The productivity journey for the non-profit Big Brothers Big Sisters of Edmonton involved the adoption of lean principles. We spoke to Kari Readman, the director of service delivery, about the impact it had on the workforce. Especially during the time of year known as surge where they would get half of their volunteers in a three-month period
“It’s more streamlined, we haven’t seen as much chaos erupt in surge, surge being September, October, November. I remember in 2008, at the end of October it was crisis mode and we had to bring in contract staff to help us with the work. Now, overtime is almost nonexistent, every single staff person is under 12 hours and there isn’t the screaming, there is no crisis, it’s just calm,” said Kari Readman.
Kim Collister is the manager of human resources and learning. She was responsible for introducing lean to the organization and to the front line workers. Lean doesn’t have to be complicated though; sometimes it’s as simple as thoughtfully organizing how you store your files.
“Our centralized filing system holds all of the thousands of files that are in process at any given time. There are potentially up to 45 individuals who would use this system so it had to be incredibly well organized. It is labeled alphabetically and there are lots of visuals up around process to ensure that people understand which way they need to be certain things, to filing to how you put something back in the drawer. It makes the paperwork easily accessible to all of them and lots of people can fit along this long station at the same time, said Collister.
“We also put our surge updates here as well so everyone can see the success that we’re having as well so it is really a centralized where lots of people come and work and it keeps it organized. Even the placement of it was really strategic, just in terms of the flow. We had spaghetti mapped the efforts that our employees had to make just in order to get to our centralized filing. We found the spaghetti map to be in real disarray and we wanted to ensure really clean lines of movement within our office. Just so they weren’t wasting any time traveling back and forth.”
The way Big Brothers Big Sisters of Edmonton has integrated lean they’ve addressed challenges that are common to every office.
“The reception area for the volunteer and client services department was one of the first areas that we really looked at in terms of lean. Our volunteers were telling us that the process was taking too long and that they wanted to be matched in a faster fashion. First off, we just looked at the layout of individuals and the work that they were doing and we wanted to group like individuals with one another and because they’re all centralized in one area they can say, ‘this is going on the top for one reason this is going on the bottom for this reason,” said Collister.
And when you hear about the results, you’ll wonder why more non-profits aren’t following the lean lead of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Edmonton.
“The major benefit our agency has seen in terms of using lean has been a reduction in the overtime, a reduction in the sick time. We had a 65% reduction from 2008 to 2009 in the amount of overtime. We have seen happier staff, a staff who are engaged, really lean is a team building concept. It’s a great opportunity for front line staff to work with managers and supervisors in order to see what can we do better for our bottom line and our bottom line is kids,” said Collister.
“It’s filtered through all of the different segments of our organization as well, it’s helped with our grant writing, our human resources our technology. It’s a buzzword that has really caught on around here and it’s fun to talk about. It’s really brought our team together and everyone has really bought in from our front line all the way up to our managers.”
