How lean ideas and a kanban board can increase employee satisfaction
Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 12:01 pm. 0 comments
Hackman and Oldham (1976) have a theory of job enrichment which suggests that jobs that are complex and challenging often enhance employee motivation, increase satisfaction, and help with productivity. They also suggest that there are several characteristics that are important for designing work to be “enriched” and lean ideas map well onto their theory of motivation. It seems then that using a kanban board, such as Zen as part of your project management can help to increase satisfaction and performance. I will describe the five characteristics they believe are important for work design for enrichment and how lean ideas/kanban boards fit with their theory.
Their first characteristic is skill variety. They believe that in order for people to be motivated at work, they need to do different activities using many of their skills and talents. Most jobs that require the use of a project management tool are likely to have some level of skill variety built in (or at least they should). This principle fits with the lean principles of software development discussed by Poppendieck and Poppendieck (2007). Specifically, they talk about respecting people and the myth that there is one best way to do something. Allowing your employees to write software in the way that lets them use their unique talents and skills is going to be important for their motivation. This seems like common sense, but there are a lot of companies that bring in employees because of their skill set or ideas and then do not allow the employees to use them to their full potential. I could go on for a while about this topic alone, but I’ll keep it short.
The second idea is task identity, meaning that a person’s job requires completion of a “whole” and identifiable unit of work from beginning to end. They note the importance of understanding when the task is complete with “a visible outcome.” It is pretty clear how this maps on to using a kanban board. A story is used as the identifiable piece of work that is assigned to an individual and it is clear how that unit of work moves through your value stream from beginning to end. Because Zen is focused on visibility regardless of location, all members of a team can see how a story moves from start to finish and the visible outcome that Hackman and Oldham describe.
Their next point is task significance. It basically means that people have to believe that what they are doing has some importance. With software development, it is likely that what you are working on fits with a group of stories that makes up an area of the product like user interface or security. With Zen, you can tag stories with the area of the product to help put the story with the right context and keep the work meaningful. If people can keep in mind how what they are working on fits with the product as a whole, they are more likely to see their job as meaningful.
The fourth characteristic is autonomy meaning freedom, independence, and discretion with regards to the schedule/procedures used to carry out the job. The best part of Zen is that it focuses on flexibility and the continual movement of work through your value stream. Because the value stream names, numbers, and order can be customized, you have discretion with the procedures that you use. You can also use different colors, tags, etc. so you have the freedom to work the way that you want to. Because everything is organized in a board format, you know exactly what is going on and what needs to be done next, so you can work independently, without having someone tell you what to do next. There is definitely a sense of team empowerment that comes with using Zen.
The last idea is feedback. This means that it is important that people receive clear information about their performance. Feedback is important for lean software development as discussed in the Poppendieck and Poppendieck book (2007), but since they discuss it in some detail, I want to talk about feedback specifically with Zen. What many manual kanban boards lack is objective feedback about the process. People may sit down to hand calculate lean metrics like cycle time and lead time, but hand calculation is really a waste when a tool like Zen can do it. The metrics that Zen calculates gives you a snapshot of the effectiveness of your process. Thus, it has feedback built right in.
These characteristics were combined into one measure that looked at these 5 facets. One could easily empirically test the idea that implementing lean ideas and a kanban board like Zen could increase satisfaction, motivation, and productivity, but for now I think it is an interesting idea to think about.
