Another interesting thing is, as we discussed before, people often don’t know the basic financials of an organisation. We went to a cookie factory where they also increased transparency. Why? Because the Director became really frustrated with how employees constantly came up to him to ask for pay rises. This might sound familiar to you as well, but he said, “We simply cannot do it.” People then went back frustrated that they couldn’t get a pay rise when they thought they made a lot of money as an organisation, so why can’t they spend more on salary?

After having heard these complaints for a long time, what he did was he said, “well maybe I have to explain to them the financial situation we are in.” So he made it very simple, he drew this big package of cookies and showed them, saying nowadays they sell these cookies for €2, and this is the cost we spend on marketing, on production, on raw materials, on salary levels, and he built up the entire cost of this package of cookies and he said, “There are two things we can do to increase your salary levels. We can either raise the price of the cookies, but we probably won’t sell enough anymore. Or, we can play around with any of the other costs we have, become more efficient in the way we work, and then we can increase your salary levels.”

All of a sudden, people understood what was going on and they saw for example, the cost of waste in the production process, and they started focusing on how they could eliminate waste as much as possible. So the interesting thing is that people were not put on training for lean or any other methodology – they themselves thought they wanted to decrease this waste and worked out how they could do that, because if they did that they would increase their salary. So people became really engaged and involved in running the organisation, simply because they understood what was going on financially, and this is something we see in a lot of organisations.