Story:
Teaming at GE Aviation

For the last three years, the GE Aviation Supply Chain leadership team has been implementing a teaming work structure across the organization.  This means that workers will take on roles traditionally performed by management or support personnel, including production planning and scheduling, setting policies about overtime and vacation, participating in the hiring process for new workers, purchasing equipment, and helping to set up manufacturing processes.  In short, workers will own the production process and participate in the management of the plant.  The difference in a teaming facility is not simply changing the work structures and processes; it represents a different culture, a different way of thinking about work and a different set of attitudes and values for both managers and employees.

Teaming represents the largest organizational initiative in GE Aviation’s recent history, which has caused both anxiety and great energy as people begin to understand what is needed to make teaming work across a global business.  In order to provide a framework for this journey, GE Aviation Supply Chain created five phases for teaming, which embodies the cycles a team or facility will experience:

• Get Ready: Leadership learns teaming and develops initial strategy for teaming roll-out.
• Launch: Individuals become oriented to the team and work together to determine team dynamics.
• Journey: Each unit begins to define accountability while determining day-to-day responsibilities.
• Ownership: Units begin to take ownership and accountability of their process, product and duties.
• Growth: Units are functioning as self-sustained, self-directed work teams; always looking for improvement and growth opportunities.

Bromont, Quebec (Canada)

While GE Aviation Supply Chain wanted to have a common framework with the phases of teaming, it  also understood that teaming will look different at every site where it is implemented, and the plants in Bromont, Quebec (Canada) and Durham, NC (USA) were powerful models to emulate.  At the Bromont plant, teaming has been built into the structure and culture of the plant from the time it opened in 1982.  The plant’s management structure is flat, with only three levels (plant leader, support team, and production teams).  Many leadership responsibilities rest with production teams, including quality, health and safety, process improvement, production planning and overtime management, purchasing new equipment, and training, among others.  The production teams are responsible for a variety of roles that were done by management in a traditional shop.  Management of the various areas are accomplished  through a committee structure in which team members are elected to serve for periods of time in specific leadership roles and serve as representatives on the committees.  (See Exhibit: Bromont Participative Management Organization). The committees (also referred to as councils in some plants) is a forum in which representatives from each team in the plant come together on a regular bases to discuss site-wide topics, take recommendations back to their teams, and make decisions that affect the entire facility. Committee meeting schedules vary by plant. The Bromont facility has 14 standing committees, which are divided between recommendation and decision committees.

• The recommendation committees are plant, modernized multi-skilling, gain sharing and compensation.
• The decision committees are dispute resolution, health and safety, social activities, cell operating multi-skilling  progress and hiring.
• Committees that are both recommendation and decision are training, production, first responders, intervention brigade and Healthahead.

The committees’ representatives make decisions on behalf of the team and in turn have the responsibility of communicating actions back to their teams.  The committees also serve as a place where representatives can voice team concerns or opinions in a plant-wide setting.  An example is the plant committee, which includes representatives from each team, plant leadership and human resources. The plant committee addresses issues of concern for the entire plant, such as hiring, establishing wage grades and decisions about allocating overtime, promotions or moving employees between shifts.   All front-line operators are required to be multi-skilled, mastering at least four jobs before reaching the top pay grade. There is only one job classification for production workers. Workers are expected to continually learn new jobs, and the company mandates 120 hours of formal training per year. Each team’s training committee establishes a plan regularly to move workers from one job to another, even if not demanded by production needs, in order to keep their skills sharp.

The structures and processes around teaming  helps create a strong culture of values, such as trust, respect, humility and accountability at all levels of the organization.  Workers take responsibility for themselves and leadership within their teams, while engineers and managers are humble enough to recognize that ideas for improvements might come from the plant floor.  Engineers are technical exempt employees who constantly walk the plant floor, which fosters an environment of constant communication because operators offer suggestions for innovations and improvements.  Engineers are expected to listen to employees and work with them to make improvements, so there is always continuous process improvement coming up from the plant floor.  The same is true in Durham and other teaming sites; part of the transition to teaming is to train engineers to respond to calls from the plant floor and for operators to have the confidence to bring problems with the design or process to engineering or management.  A great example of accountability is a voluntary program the plant put in place. Bromont’s  accident rate dropped dramatically when the plant introduced a program in 2007 in which workers volunteered to observe other operators (who agreed to be observed) and give them feedback on their behaviors as related to health and safety.  The program showed a dramatic improvement over a similar behavior-based program in which supervisors provided the observations and feedback, which had only marginal success. A similar program of peer observation and feedback identified behavior-based quality issues and contributed to similar improvements in quality outcomes

None of this happened right away, and employees in Bromont recognized that in order to maintain the culture of their plant, they had to ensure they successfully integrated newly hired employees.  The Bromont plant’s hiring committee, which includes representatives from the production team as well as HR and the leadership team, work hard to determine if a potential hire, whether an hourly production worker or a manager, shares the values of the plant’s culture and how well he or she will collaborate with others.  Bromont plant leaders cite a number of examples that illustrated the power of teaming.  One in particular was during the years of 2008 and 2009, in which the production needs were going down and the plant needed to reduce overall production volume and labor hours.  The plant leader presented the problem to the plant committee, which came up with a plan of offering an unpaid leave of absence to those who wanted to take it. The team representatives took the suggestion back to their teams and secured enough volunteers to meet the necessary reduction.  During that time, the flexibility of the workforce meant that people could move from team to team, and from shift to shift if necessary, enabling the plant to weather the downturn.  GE leaders insisted that because the plan was initiated by the representatives of the various teams, it faced much less resistance than it would have if management had proposed such a plan in a more top-down organization.

Bromont has more than 700 employees with approximately 80 salaried exempt and 630 hourly.  There are eight teams within the facility, with six focused on production and two service teams focused on tasks like maintenance and tooling. Most of the technical support staff (technicians, engineers, etc.) and cell leaders (called coaches at some sites) are dedicated to specific teams as a means of achieving the team’s goal. There are other support functions such as HR, Finance, IT, and EHS that aren’t dedicated to one team, but they support all teams. On average about 70-80 people are on each production team (the smallest team has 55 and the largest team has 140). An example of team structure is Team Titan. Each team consists of two coaches and the team members are broken into 11 sub-teams based on processes and machines (i.e. grinders, inspection, etc.).  The sub-team model works for Bromont because it allows everyone to be multi-skilled, which permits people to support each other and go where the help is needed.

Each team elects team members to serve in roles for two years with the responsibility of performing specifics tasks that help the team to operate more effectively.  Some roles are done through an election process by the entire team, and other roles, such as the more technical roles, go through an interview process.  Teams make the final decision of who will fill a certain role. The most common roles on teams are:

• Line of Balance- production planning
• EHS & Preventative Maintenance- these two roles are combined because it allows issues to be fixed much faster than if they were separate
• Quality- work closely with quality support staff to find solutions and conduct status checks
• New Product Introduction- work alongside engineers to test new processes

Understanding business metrics is key to the success of every employee at Bromont. The facility has a world-class visual management system, where employees can see real time how they are doing against their metrics. The facility has a site-wide gain-sharing program based on the facility’s performance to goals. Everyone participates in the gain-sharing program, and the payout is contingent on how well the facility does.

Team members in Bromont have a wide range of flexibility. Team members can perform many jobs from one process to another, and they are proud to take on responsibility for tasks that are usually performed by management. Because of the size of the teams, there are various ways in which teams make decisions. While consensus is the preferred method, some decisions do happen by voting. For example, when it comes to hiring there is a formal process, but the team will use consensus, which allows for everyone’s opinion to be heard,) to ultimately select on the right candidate.

Conflict is unavoidable, and teams receive ongoing coaching on how to deal with conflict. When conflict does arise in the team, the team members will try to work it out themselves initially. If this strategy doesn’t work, they will then solicit the help of their cell leader. If that doesn’t resolve the issue, they will take it to the cell operating committee (two cell leaders, three team members, HR representative).  If it is conflict over a rule or policy, it can be brought up to the next level, either cell operating committee for a team rule or the plant committee for a plant-wide rule or policy. At both these levels, employees have the power to change these rules by adding the change to the committee’s agenda and working it through the team.

While teams take on a lot of the responsibility of traditional managers, cell leaders still play a critical role in the success of the facility. The Bromont team believes that a good high performing team is complemented by great cell leaders. The cell leaders are there to help encourage ideas, engage their teams in the business metrics and facilitate communication within the team when needed.

Durham, NC (USA)

Durham has been teaming for the last 20 years, and this work culture has led to increased productivity and product quality improvements, even on relatively mature products that have been assembled at the plant for many years. Empowered to constantly seek new ways to improve productivity, one engine assembly team worked on projects that lead to faster assembly and better quality, improving an engine that had been in production for more than 10 years. Team members also call engineering to highlight design for assembly improvements. They are very proud to bring engine designers in to highlight sequence of assembly challenges or other improvements that they discover. The teaming environment fosters open communications and encourages fresh and diverse thinking, resulting in a steady flow of improvement ideas. (See Exhibit: Durham Engine Facility).  

Another benefit of teaming at Durham is the ability to flexibly balance workloads. Durham assembles the “hot section” of the engine for the Airbus A380.  Because A380 sales had been choppy, team members can flexibly shift between other engine lines as needed. The steep production ramp-up of the new GEnx engine for the Boeing 787 means that frequent component shortages or shipment delays bring challenges to the production schedule.  Team members recognize the importance of on-time delivery of completed engines, so they adjust their work hours based on when components are available, changing shifts during the week and weekends as needed to keep production on track without adding overtime hours to the schedule. Team members actually seem to enjoy the flexible work schedules, trading weekday and weekend shifts with ease.

Durham teams have assumed responsibility for the arrangement of their workspaces, and they are flexible on how work is divided.  Senior team members often mentor newer operators, letting them manage update meetings as a way to learn communication skills or trading jobs as a way of learning. The Durham plant manager even works on engine builds on a regular basis. Health and Safety and productivity gains have in part been driven by systems of peer observation and feedback.  . 

Durham currently has 19 teams (18 production teams and one support team). There are approximately 315 technicians overall, with an additional 35 support exempt employees. On average, there are 18 technicians per team with a range of 10-22 on a team. Three support team members are dedicated to each program: Program Improvement Leader, Quality Leader and Materials Leader (for example GEnx has five teams, but one support team to cover all five for the program). Durham has two shifts and both shifts meet together for an “overlap” meeting every day from 2:30-3:30 (note: in plants with three shifts, there are “overlap” meetings between 1^st and 2^nd, 2^nd and 3^rd, 3^rd and 1^st).

Every team has various roles and responsibilities that are divided among team members. Teams are responsible for such things as quality, production planning, overtime, process development, EHS, team training, hiring and preventative maintenance. Every team member is crossed trained, which allows flexibility for teams to cover things, such as vacations and other roles within the plant (i.e. council representation). Examples of team roles are the materials representative and workstation owner, which require someone to stay in these roles for 12 months.  The materials representative has a meeting every week with their support team, and they help schedule manpower because they know where material is and when it will be available. They also kick off the team meetings to talk about coverage and manpower.

The work station owner is a strategic role on the team and this person spends a lot of time off the floor working on making the workstation (or area) more optimal for the team. The work station owner is responsible for the planning for the build (change in design and assembly practice) and setting up the work station to address ergonomic concerns. 

While every team has its own unique personality, there are also some similarities when it comes to how the teams function. As previously stated, every team has a materials representative who kicks off each team meeting and explains where materials are and where the team is in the production process. The representative also assigns who will work on what for the day.  Each team also has a set meeting agenda, which includes: safety, quality, business, personnel and council updates.  Most of the team meeting is spent on quality, manpower plannin, and performance management.

Similar to Bromont, the Durham facility has site-wide committees. Durham has 11 committees that fall under four categories: People, Processes, Quality and Health and Wellness. The purpose of these committees is to bring a representative from each of the 19 teams together to discuss site-wide topics and make decisions. Selection to be a council representative is strictly voluntarily, and the commitment is 12 months. Technicians must serve in a council role if they desire to move to a higher level.  The councils at Durham are as follows:

• People (Human Resources, Positive Discipline & Personal Development, Training)
• Processes (Tool & Gauge, Materials, IT Systems)
• Quality (Quality Systems)
• Health and Wellness (Environment/Health/Safety, HealthAhead)

When it comes to decision making, the Durham teams have tremendous flexibility. While there are boundaries, the teams take on many decisions that managers in a traditional organization would normally perform.  So what decisions do the teams make that a traditional manager normally would and what process do they utilize? Some examples of decisions made by the team include:

• Manpower planning: Determines how many people are needed on each shift with the flexibility to adjust this based on business need.
• Personal time off: Technicians are allowed five personal business days, and the team can approve up to three of those days (days 4 and 5 must be approved by plant leader).
• Teams can decide to put someone on a coaching plan, which is a form of performance management that is managed by the team for a team member who may be having issues in a particular area but may not warrant discipline, such as suspension or termination. The coaching plan is meant to help the team member improve  performance or behavior and is a step that occurs before more serious action occurs. When it comes to discipline beyond coaching, the team can submit its thoughts to the Positive Discipline & Personal Development Council, and peers from the council can recommend action to the plant leader. The team does the investigation and submits it to the plant leader.
  • What is the role of HR?  HR is a support resource for all teams and the three councils under people. In particular to the Positive Discipline & Personal Development Council, HR facilitates training on proper ways to investigate, addresses any legal and policy related questions, and steps in if the council isn’t handling something correctly. Otherwise the technicians lead the process of investigation and recommend the discipline to the plant leader.

Teams use the process of consensus to come to decisions. The big factor in consensus decision making is “can everyone live with the decision”. This doesn’t mean everyone agrees, but everyone will support the decision moving forward. Consensus can be tough and not always achieved quickly, but it allows for everyone’s opinion to be heard and the team to come to a more thoughtful decision.

Within any team there is always some form of conflict, even at a very mature teaming site such as Durham. The teams are taught to utilize the following steps when dealing with conflict.

• Address 1-on-1.
• Team level discussion: Those involved can bring it up to a team if the 1-on-1 didn’t work (there is a team-level discussion and everyone signs).
• Coaching plan: The entire team will put an individual on the plan and the person getting coached can select their coach
• If none of the above works, they will go to the Positive Discipline & Personal Development Council and pull in HR for coaching if needed.

In order for teams to have a great foundation, they must understand the business. The team also must have accurate information about the business in order to make the best decisions.  Durham’s teams participate in  a quarterly program review with the plant leader when they share their metrics and how they are doing against them.  Each team has a “dashboard” or scorecard of metrics that can be viewed at the plant level, team level and individual level. During the quarterly review, the dashboard is reviewed at the team level. Metrics included in the dashboards are as follows:

• Safety
• Quality
• Delivery
• Financials

While Durham doesn’t have a site-wide gain-sharing program, each team receives funding if they meet their EHS metrics that they can use for team-building activities.  The Plant Leader also gives every team eight hours of paid team-building time that they can use in four hour blocks.

Over time, Durham’s leaders have learned the difference between high-performing teams and  low-performing teams is communication and understanding the business. High-performing teams understand cycle time and if they don’t have material ready, they find other activities to do to avoid idle time. They also understand how to utilize manpower to support the team or other teams that need support. Being open and transparent with each other on such things as when they will be out or any quality/EHS issues also contribute to the success of the team.