Bheemannadora Sappa

Definition of Mental Health: Mental Health is physical, emotional, psychological and social well-being of a person. How does it impact quality of work/productivity/performance/engagement at work place? The overall health of a workplace includes both the physical and psychological well-being of its workers. By treating mental health and its psychological component equally with the physical environment, a workplace can support their workers’ overall well-being. Poor mental health not only hurts the individual, it also reduces corporate profits. It's important that all levels of the workplace - including the Board of Directors, management, finance, and human resources departments - get involved to incorporate mental health at your workplace. It is also necessary to engage your health and safety committee and workers - we all have a shared responsibility for health and safety, including mental health. A common mistake made by employers is believing that a great employee engagement strategy will ultimately lead to good levels of employee mental health at work. The only way this would be true is if their engagement strategy had specific systems in place to address employee mental health, an issue of growing importance in the modern workplace. With stress and anxiety levels rising, employers won’t know how to improve employee engagement if they fail to recognize the key role mental health plays in the mix. While many employers have accepted that employee engagement is key to the success of their business and are taking action, most are unaware of the secret obstacle in their path: employee mental health. There is overwhelming evidence to show that factors like insufficient sleep, difficult working environments and stress/anxiety over workload are affecting employees’ ability to feel truly connected to their organisation’s goals and values - no matter how high their salary or generous their benefits package. Managers directly responsible for managing the productivity and performance of a team, it’s not uncommon for them focus all their energy on organizing their team, ensuring they meet deadlines and hit targets. However, this often means the human side of things fades into the background. Stress and anxiety over unrealistic deadlines and unmanageable workloads are all too common problems in the workplace, as is lack of sleep and having a bad work/life balance. How it can be improved? Mentally happy employees are ultimately more productive, it’s certainly worth managers adapting their management style to reduce these mental health triggers. Managers who are supportive and approachable are more likely to inspire greater commitment and engagement from their employees as they feel valued and looked after. While employees may not come to their managers directly to discuss their struggle with stress, anxiety and depression, line managers can certainly help by: 1. Enforcing reasonable working hours to avoid burn out 2. Understanding that employees may react differently to stress, and have different stress triggers 3. Encouraging employees to take their full lunch hour and other breaks when needed 4. Making it possible for employees to take their annual leave allowance 5. Having regular, informal catch-ups with individual employees so they feel listened to and able to resolve issues before they escalate into stressful situations 6. Ensuring employees are comfortable asking for help 7. Considering flexible working hours or work-from-home days 8. Making employees understand that taking a ‘mental sick day’ is as important for their health as a physical one. Having good relationships with senior management is also useful in ensuring good mental health at work. It can help foster trust, inspiring confidence in the direction the organisation is moving. In terms of combating mental health problems at work, getting senior management on board will bring a real sense of authenticity to the systems being put in place. Senior management are responsible for ensuring managers are trained in mental health and stress management and advising/guiding them on how to approach these issues in line with the company’s values.

TPS expert Shigeo Shingo provided us with four targets for Kaizen in order of their priority: 1. Easier 2. Better 3. Faster 4. Cheaper We agree with the priorities of the target because 1. "Easier" is an improvement point from operator point of view, it also focus on safety. safety is first priority. 2. "Better" is an quality improvement activity of the product/operation. 3. "Faster" is an improvement activity to improve the efficiency 4. "Cheaper" is the last target of all improvement activities.

Brainstorming is an individual or group method for generating ideas and solutions to problems. Limitations in Brainstorming / How to overcome: 1. The focus on the quantity of ideas can be derailed easily by criticism or poor facilitation. In such case requires an experienced facilitator who is sensitive to group dynamics and social pressures and not afraid to note violations of the ground rules. 2. Group with a large numbers will not effective. In such case use group size 3 - 10, not more than that. 3. Extroverts or the senior people tend to dominate group work. In such case stop the involvement of senior people in the initial brainstorming session. 4. Some participants will not express their ideas “because of the belief that they will be seen as inarticulate or suggest ideas that have little or no values". In such case use brainwriting. "brainwriting refers to a group of methods that emphasize the silent generation of ideas in writing” 5. Participants social anxiousness or feeling that their ideas will be negatively evaluated by other team members. In such case use nominal group than the interactive brainstorming group. 6. Some participants stay quite during the brainstorm session. In such case use Round Robin method of brainstorming, which allows everyone to pitch in and contribute. 7. The quantity of ideas will suffer when one participant is speaking and blocking the idea generation of the other members. So it is better allow only one group member to speak at a time.

Pre-control charts are the charts made using USL and LSL limits. it is normally preferred VOC. the tolerance between these USL and LSL is divided into two zones, Green and Yellow, Out of tolerance is considered as Red zone. Green is 50% of the tolerance in the center, Yellow is 25%+25% of tolerance to both sides of green. If the part specification falls either in Green Zone or Yellow Zone, it is acceptable. If the part specification falls in Red Zone, it is not acceptable. Pre-control chart with the above limits are printed in paper with color bands and do charting in shop floor. It helps shop floor operator to control the process so that defective parts are not produced. There are defined rules to qualify the process / setup. How Pre-control charts different from control charts, Advantages: 1. Control chart preferred voice of process, but pre-control charts preferred VOC. 2. Control charts are difficult to understand by shop floor operators, whereas Pre-control charts are simple to understand by shop floor persons. 3. Control charts need sample data and the control limits are derived from the data, whereas Pre-control charts the control limits are Green Zone. 4. Control charts doesn't give the behavior of the process from very beginning, whereas Pre-control charts gives the process behaviour from very beginning. 5. Control charts needs subgroup data to define the control limits, whereas Pre-control charts we are measuring individual measurements. Disadvantages: 1. Pre-control does not concern itself with understanding or estimating process characteristics vital to achieving product quality. 2. Any obvious patterns over time that indicate trends or cycles are not easily detected. 3. Since Pre-control charts uses individual values, it provides little power to detect anything but large process changes. So, pre control chart cannot help detect process change and variation unless drastic. 4. Pre-control is reactionary in nature and does not focus on finding or eliminating the sources of process changes. It leaves it up to the operators to make adjustments to stay within specifications and gives very little attention to eliminating variation at source.

Thanks for the reply, can i get the best template to define the QFD,CTQ drill down for the engineering characteristics?

Thank you for the nice explanation on the difference between Kano Model and NGT, Could you please let me know whether we can use Kano Model only for the product development?, is it possible to use this model to take decision on the needs of the new machinery required for the manufacturing (as decision tool to collect the stake holder needs, for example production, quality and mfg engineering)?, the similar way can we take NGT also as a decision tool for the above need?, thank you to reply me.

I would like to know what is the difference between nominal group technique and kano analysis