LEGO® Bricks Lead to Employee Engagement
Employing LEGO Bricks Results in Clarity and Removing Uncertainty for Sur-Seal.
Mick Wilz, owner and director of enterprise excellence at Sur-Seal, first used LEGO® bricks to simulate the layout changes a factory was undergoing. The goal is to remove uncertainty because, Wilz reasons, change isn’t what people are afraid of — it’s the uncertainty that’s often associated with change.
LEGO® bricks can be assembled into models of the Seattle Space Needle or the Eiffel Tower. So does using the versatile toy blocks for workplace models and to improve employee engagement really seem like such a stretch?
Absolutely not, said Mick Wilz, owner and director of enterprise excellence at Sur-Seal, which he showed in his “LEGO Bricks=Engagement” presentation at AME Chicago 2012.
Businesses deploy all kinds of methods to foster positive results with employee engagement. Wilz knows what’s worked for Sur-Seal. Sur-Seal is a Cincinnati-based provider of sealing solutions to OEM’s in the lighting/electronics, HVAC and medical industries. Those steps made Sur-Seal a recipient of a 2012 AME Manufacturing Excellence Award. Wilz’s presentation highlighted the methods and philosophy that have driven the company’s engagement strategy.
The LEGO bricks Wilz deploys are a specific component of Sur-Seal’s general approach to employee engagement, which boils down to one concept: Remove uncertainty. Because, Wilz reasons, change isn’t what people are afraid of — it’s the uncertainty that’s often associated with change.
“What I did over my business career is take the uncertainty out for people,” said Wilz, now the president of AME’s Great Lakes region. (See Wilz’s profile on Page 11.) “They are not afraid of change, and then they’ll join in and help you.”
Wilz first used LEGO bricks at Sur-Seal a few years ago, when the 60,000-square-foot Sur-Seal factory was undergoing layout changes. He decided to use his children’s LEGO bricks to construct a model of the current layout. He labeled each of the factory’s processes — and employees — in the simulation model. Wilz then began to move figures around on the model to simulate the proposed changes in the plant’s layout.
“First it was, ‘OK, why are we playing with the LEGO bricks?’” said Denise Smith, Sur-Seal supervisor of assembly, in a video posted on Sur-Seal’s website. “But then as we saw and we listened more to Mick and his vision of what he was wanting to do, it made sense.”
With the visuals right in front of them — and the ability to make their own suggestions and proposed adjustments — Sur-Seal’s workers were immediately involved in the layout changes firsthand. The LEGO model also helped the workers understand the factory’s needs with regard to flow.
“LEGO bricks are a universal toy,” Wilz said. “And when you play with toys, it takes you back to your childhood. The way a child thinks is so much different than an adult. You’re in it just for fun, and you can be creative.
“Comparing that to a normal CAD drawing, if you do a CAD drawing of the plant, people can look at it and give their input. But the end result is still under one person’s control. You can’t get in there and say, ‘Oh, I want changes.’ But with LEGO bricks, they never lost control.”
The impact of the LEGO model — and by extension, the employees’ hands in shaping the plant’s redesign — was dramatic. The company’s sales per paid hour have shot up by 75 percent since 2008, along with a 31 percent increase in sales during the past three years. Sur-Seal has also seen a 27 percent increase in manufacturing space and a doubling of both the company’s profits and new accounts.
“It’s hard sometimes to gauge or to say that it’s a 100 percent, one-to-one correlation,” said Tony Wright, Sur-Seal’s CFO. “I think that we definitely are getting more out of our folks than if we hadn’t done the engagement process.”
During his presentation in Chicago, Wilz also outlined another key part of Sur-Seal’s engagement strategy: the 20 Keys. It’s a 20-step assessment in which each employee ranks the company on each key, and the resulting quantitative evaluation shows where Sur-Seal needs to focus its resources. The keys employees evaluate include such facets of the workplace as leadership, communication, customer partnerships and training.
A key unifying event was a 12-week workbook club, which featured 35 readers, including Sur-Seal’s top-level leaders. The book under discussion was Engagement is Not Enough, by Keith Ayers.
“The big outcome from that was there are just some stupid little barriers (that) are holding you back,” Wilz said. “Maybe something I said to somebody four or five years ago and didn’t even know that I offended them. They came out on that table, and you’re able to work through it.”
Despite the metrics that show that Sur-Seal’s engagement methods have been working, Wilz said he’s a firm believer that engagement can’t be measured.
“Just think if you were married, and you went home to your wife and said, ‘Hey, I want to measure how much I love you,’” he said. “You’d get in trouble. It’s the same thing with engagement. True engagement cannot be measured because it’s not measurable. It has to come from the heart.”
Whatever methods a business uses to get its employees actively and passionately involved in the culture of the workplace, it stands to reason that the philosophy toward engagement championed by Sur-Seal is a good one to emulate.
“We have not lost a major customer in 40 years,” Wright said. “The key is, from the inside out, we have made long-term connections with our employees, and they understand the long-term solutions that our customers need.”