Engaging your workforce is a major obstacle in a lean Six Sigma implementation. Only a limited number of employees will initially participate in Six Sigma improvement projects. It can also take one to two years before all employees participate in a lean kaizen event. It’s best to encourage individual improvement efforts and to provide just-in-time training to minimize the frustration of an employee who has been trained but is still waiting to participate on a team. There is another approach to this problem: service-recovery planning. Service recovery means to proactively respond to a defect in a organization’s service process. It can be done tomorrow by all employees at your company. It can be fun and it takes little or no training. The outcome is empowered employees and happier customers. How could this be a bad thing to do?

Service-recovery planning is a form of contingency planning. A few years ago, when many were concerned about Y2K, we placed a great deal of emphasis on this type of thinking. Then we forgot about it for a while. More recently, Sept. 11, Hurricane Katrina and other major catastrophes have placed contingency planning in the front and center once again. The same line of thinking should be used by organizations.

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