Earlier this week, 100 attendees from near and far descended on Salt Lake City for the 2010 International Visual Workplace Summit, sponsored by the QMI Visual Lean Institute and the Utah Manufacturing Extension Partnership. We were all there to discuss the visual workplace. My first question was, “What’s that?”

I quickly learned that a visual workplace is “a work environment that is self-ordering, self-explaining, self-regulating, and self-improving where what is supposed to happen does happen, on time, every time, day or night because of visual devices.

A basic example

One of the presenters showed a before-and-after use of workplace visuality. Before, forklift drivers placed pallets randomly around the factory, based on what was expedient for them. After visual instructions (e.g., floor markings) were created, the result was not just a tidier workplace, but also a more reliable and predictable workflow. This simple addition created an environment that encouraged employees to ask questions and offer suggestions because the culture had shifted to one of a greater precision in communication, visually.

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