Visual Management: What’s In It For Me?

Answering the question “What’s In It For Me” (also known by its acronym WIIFM, pronounced “WE-FEM”) is a common change management strategy. Often times the approach is to demonstrate how one method or another is important and how the application of that method will help the person you’re trying to persuade. Almost always, education is required and teaching must be done while you demonstrate the benefits. So, today, I’m going to attempt to persuade you to give Visual Management a shot.

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What is Visual Management?

Visual Management defined is as follows:

• Visual Management provide real-time information on work place status by a combination of simple, effective visual information aids that allow employees to understand their influence on the organization overall performance hence allowing the employees to improve their performance.

How might you benefit from the application of Visual Management? Here are some ways:

1. Expose waste so that it can be eliminated and prevented from recurring making the workplace more efficient.
2. Make abnormalities in the 4Ms (Man, Machine, Material, Method) process inputs visible to everyone for prompt corrective action.
3. Enable trends in Quality, Safety, Delivery, Cost (QSDC) & abnormalities to be visible for timely preventive action to be taken.
4. Motivates everybody to improve by clarifying key performance targets.
5. Makes operation standards quicker and easier to understand by all employees so they can follow them.
6. Builds participation through shared information.
7. Creates flow in the value stream and allows pull to the voice of the customer.

In general, below are the 9 areas of Visual Management in business:

Interestingly, some of the most effective applications I’ve seen of Visual Management are not in business or operations; they are in the classroom.

Here’s one very simple but effective application of Visual Management to remove clutter in the classroom, but also to alert the teacher on the status of children’s birthday:

A simple birthday display board is incredibly helpful for a teacher and is simple, effective, and achieves the outcome for its design: to alert the teacher on which kids have a birthday that month.

What’s your experience on Visual Management? Have you seen or experienced effective displays of Visual Management in the workplace or outside of it?