5 Steps To Organize Your Virtual Workplace Applying the 5S method

Original article posted at Forbes.com

It’s in times of crisis when companies and CFO’s are focused on reducing waste and unneeded costs, but it’s also when they lack the time or the resources to even start. The 5S method helps to initiate the change from the bottom-up.

5S is a tool widely known in industrial companies around the world to eliminate waste, organize resources, and keep them well maintained. It is a set of 5 habits that drive individual productivity and team self-organization through a lean workplace. Ideas to reduce costs and improve productivity come directly from the team members, and they are the ones in charge of implementing them. No matter how small the changes proposed, they help to make the workplace more efficient and reduce frictions and obstacles.

Being so effective in automotive and manufacturing, it has started to be implemented in the hospitality and healthcare industries as well. A study performed by a hospital OR for instance, showed that implementing 5S, they increased the space available by 68%, reduced inventory cost and waste, motion, visual confusion and distractions, and finally reduced craniotomy infection rates.

The 5S Steps applied in the virtual space

5S steps can also be applied to remote work. As a leader, you can foster a virtual implementation to reduce errors, optimize cloud space, improve communication and remove barriers to improve productivity. Below are some ideas:

1)     Sort: 

Separate and remove unneeded items to increase focus on what is needed. While offices are going paperless, you can still find it difficult to retrieve some online documents if they are not labeled or stored correctly. Some of the issues that increase stress on a daily basis are laptop desktops covered with unused shortcuts or documents and emails lost in the cloud. There should be a standard way to organize documents to store or delete them right away and avoid procrastination. It is useful to organize folders by “delete date” to ensure you know what needs to be removed first, or moved out to another cloud. Monday, Asana and Trello are online tools that are useful to help accommodate pending tasks, prioritize and eliminate what is not required to utilize your resources better. You can have an online shared WIP (Work-in-progress) folder. That way is easy for you and your team to know what is pending to be done and avoid missing deadlines. Especially if you have shifts or different people working on the same items, these tools can reduce meetings.

2)     Store: 

Organize all the needed items in a specific “home” to have them ready to use. Documents, KPI’s and customer data that are required or consulted regularly should be stored online in folders that are easy to access, or shortcuts should be stored in commonly utilized portals. Virtual documents get lost more frequently than physical documents, so make sure folders are organized and labeled in such a way that they are easy to identify and easy to access. Documents that are only required for legal purposes and are rarely consulted should be stored in separate locations that secure the information. Some companies use Slack to “store” conversations about specifics topics on channels. At Zapier, employees have channels devoted just to socializing that are prefixed with #fun-: there’s #fun-art, #fun-dogs, #fun-baseball. 

3)     Shine: 

Set a new level of cleanliness to enable spotting potential problems. Laptops, tablets and phones are more needed than ever as they are the way to communicate with the outside world, avoiding face-to-face meetings. All types of online alarms exist to tell you are space quota is full, but you probably get used to ignore it.

How can you ensure you don’t miss a single minute of a session due to system malfunctions? Systems have to be adequately and periodically maintained to ensure apps and software run properly. Cleaning the WIP (work in progress) weekly, getting used to not storing documents in the right folder as soon as you download them, ensuring there is enough free space, using external drives or clouds, cleaning the recycle in and deleting cookies are some of the habits that can help to maintain them.

In physical spaces, you use the Fishbone Diagram to solve complex issues, such as eliminating the root cause for dirt and dust in a room. Virtually you can use the Fishbone Diagram template on Mural to brainstorm ideas on how your online tools, apps and platforms can be maintained and be utilized more efficiently. Make a list of the systems you use more often, imagine what could go wrong during a virtual event and document ideas on how to prevent it.

4)     Standardize: 

Engage the team to find a system to sort, store and shine. You can standardize how you conduct virtual meetings by defining rules such as keeping the video on or muting your sound when you stop talking. Set up a cleaning schedule for your team’s equipment and train the team members to make it part of their routine.

5S is based on the idea that standards and procedures have to be as visual and available as possible so that everyone knows what needs to be done. You can set visual or audible alarms as reminders for schedules. many companies also communicate visually during your online meetings using Supercards to give each other visual clues during your online meetings.

Scrum, for instance, is a way to standardize work in a tech team: it is a framework that helps team members follow a routine with clear roles, events, artifacts, and rules. Their WIP is called backlog, their improvement meetings are called retrospectives, and they have a way to “store” tasks by Sprints, a time-box of one month or less during which a releasable product Increment is created.

5)     Self-organize: 

Train the team to repeat the 5S steps every day until they become a daily habit. Once your team has set the standards and visual cues in the environment, all you have to do is commit to them. A school of fish, for example, self-organize to swim in a particular direction without a leader. Each fish gathers information about its nearest neighbor, the environment and the work in progress and responds accordingly. Team self-organization works the same way.

The three critical parts of self-organization are to: engage team members to think of micro-changes that could reduce costs or improve productivity, making those micro changes seamless by eliminating obstacles in the environment and repeating them every day, everywhere.

Manufacturing teams are self-organized when they can perform their work and repeat the good habits every day without constant micro-managing of the leaders. A distributed team achieves self-organization when employees are empowered to decide how many hours per week they will work, what time-frame they prefer, which tasks will get done, or how they will be performed.

Systems like StarmeUp or Small-improvements are used to help team members self-organize remotely by enhancing virtual communication, task assignment and idea generation.

5S Changes the way things get done

More than a method, 5S implies a cultural change in the way work gets done. Once team members learn to 5S remotely, they will keep reducing cost, remove waste and get things done more effectively anywhere they work, even at home. Isn’t it time to 5S your life too?