5 Ways To Maintain Six Sigma

Are you looking for different ways in which you can remind your employees about Six Sigma and why they need to pull their weight with the program? If you are not steadily using the program and you are not helping your employees to see the importance of it, you may end up having some frustration as you have employees that just are not focused on helping to make the company successful with Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a program that works when people take the time to actually work on it and when your employees are able to get into the Six Sigma mindset. If they are not believers in the program, it is hard to stay motivated. Proper training may be one of the only things that can salvage what is left of your staff at this point. People need to be reminded about the reasons why you started Six Sigma in the first place and what their role is within the program.

Six Sigma is a program that is based on understanding what type of process variations you have and what can be done about them. You need to have employees that are looking for errors and to make sure that you have employees that have the power to do something about the issues they see. When they all have the power to step up and do something, it makes it a lot easier for them to believe in it as they have confidence in the program.

Six Sigma works but it does require a very special mindset for your employees. You want to have people that are able to understand how the program works and to ensure that you have people that really can undergo the necessary training to become leaders and trainers to your new employees.

Take the improvements that you have already been able to see and build upon them. Bring in the employees that interact with the customers all the time and find out what type of approval rating you are getting from the customers. When you are able to learn about the satisfaction level, it makes it much easier for you to understand if you are doing a good job with Six Sigma or if you need to make new improvements.

A great way to motivate everyone to get involved with Six Sigma again is by having your staff look at the training and if this is something that they want to do. The Master Black Belt certification is overwhelming but it is something that does help to advance people in their careers and it's a big investment to make in your staff to show them that you want to keep them with the company for many years to come.

Getting to make people back into believers can be done with the following 5 steps:
1. Focus on problem identification. When people find a problem and then they develop a solution they will feel empowered! It helps them to really belong to the company and makes the organization into one that is successful because you have everyone committed to the quality.
2. Work on Customer needs. A great way to help you in showing the employees of the importance to Six Sigma you can look at using customer surveys. They can assist in giving you some information about what issues you still have and you can have the employees find the problems that need to be fixed based on this information.
3. Maintenance. To prevent problems you need to work on maintenance. Your employees need to be able to work on the right type of maintenance in order to keep the company successful and to keep with Six Sigma.
4. Scrapping measures. Always have a backup plan! You need this as you never know when you will have a system that fails and you need a new one.
5. Training. If all else fails, take the company back to the Six Sigma training programs again!