To maintain consistency and high quality, you sometimes need to see how everyone works by yourself. It could be done daily for small businesses as everyone might know each other well. But it will pose a challenge for large businesses with dispersed teams, different departments, or dealing with complex projects.

When there are issues arising in production, or you think there is plenty of room for improvement, you have to put your boots on the ground and check it by yourself. And the starting point will become the first obstacle, as you don't know where to start.

Fortunately, you can perform a simple exercise named "Gemba Walk," which will allow you to go to the production place and analyze how everything is working (and what isn't). In this article, we will show you the importance of Gemba Walks for your business, how you can implement them, and prepare your own using a variety of templates available for you.

The concept comes from the Japanese word "Gemba" or "Gembutsu," referring to "the real place.” Although, from a business perspective, it acknowledges the place where value is created. Gemba would be the factory floor or production plant for manufacturing businesses.

Doing Gemba Walks is fundamental to lean management, as managers will see how the actual work is performed. This will lead to a better understanding of processes and how they develop. It also encourages employees to participate in your decisions, as they can be involved instead of doing changes above them without notice.

The main objective of a Gemba Walk is to monitor the actual place to find any potential issues in the production environment. Managers and executives tour the work area, interview employees, analyze how they follow the standard operating procedures, and collect data to plan future improvements.

Gemba Walks are mostly implemented in the manufacturing industry whenever an executive or supervisor visits the factory floors to check the work process and talk to the workers about their experiences. All to improve workspace efficiency and eliminate any potential problems.

But nowadays, a Gemba Walk can be used in almost any industry. They can be adapted to any workflow. Their main purpose is to connect business leaders to their workers who keep the business running. A Gemba Walk will make a company take a more "horizontal" approach to their business, looking at it as a line of delivery that goes straight to the customer, and the customer being the most important deliverable.

In contrast with what the name suggests, a Gemba Walk doesn't need to be a physical walk anymore. It can be conducted digitally using various methods, and teams will structure those exercises to suit their workflow.

We briefly discussed the benefits a Gemba Walk would bring to your business. So we are going to further expand on how your Gemba Walk observations will help in the continuous improvement of your company.

It Allows Leaders and Managers To See What’s Going On

If you prioritize visibility on the place that creates the most value for your business, teams will be able to identify areas for process improvement, decrease certain process times, and increase quality and consistency while planning out new ideas.

You will gain new insights into their daily responsibilities whenever you talk with the individuals responsible for your project deliverables. Leaders will see where things can do better and what should be prioritized to achieve specific goals.

You will better know how people perform standard operating procedures, and increased visibility will help keep the necessary brand standards.

Improves Employee Engagement At Work

A Gemba Walk provides managers to directly engage with staff and employees. It gives them the opportunity to talk about their main pain points, new ideas to improve processes, workflow suggestions that might boost cost efficiency, and other sorts of ideas.

Ultimately, a Gemba Walk works towards better employee engagement, improving staff turnover time. This also often results in a morale boost for your employees. This practice demonstrates that the company knows the value of its frontline workers and cares about professional development.

Encourages Workflow Changes

A Gemba Walk allows leaders and supervisors to gradually implement major changes to be better acquainted and accepted by employees. Then, during a future Gemba Walk, you can check on these new work processes, answer staff questions and doubts, and record observations to gradually roll out new procedures.

If you manage to create an open environment for discussion and observation, it will encourage employees to embrace those changes readily and faster. This exercise will make your team part of implementing and creating those changes instead of being a spectator as others adjust their workflow. It ultimately fosters teamwork and collaboration among all the team members.

Introduces Your Workplace Into a More Open and Collaborative Culture

Fostering this kind of collaborative and teamwork culture at the workplace gives space for brainstorming new ideas and generating more room for improvement. It makes the staff feel confident in sharing their thoughts and empowers them to do so.

Expanding this culture throughout the organization also boosts employee happiness and retention. It will keep everyone on the same page and allow everyone to surface potential issues, so they can resolve them quickly.

Saves Time And Money by Streamlining Operations

Gemba Walk benefits will resume streamlining operations, saving time and money for your business.

Since a Gemba Walk is designed to eliminate any time waster in the many work processes, you can identify problem areas early and think about the best solution to get rid of them. Doing regular Gemba Walks will ultimately save you time in the long run and improve your bottom line.

A Gemba Walk will always revolve around four main concepts: Preparing, scheduling, observing, and reflecting.

Some steps might be more extensive depending on the industry and type of company where it is implemented. But it will always revolve around these concepts. With these in mind, you will be able to properly do your Gemba Walks across different workplaces.

Prepare Your Questions

A Gemba Walk can be tailored to address specific pain points in certain workplaces, like how certain work processes are done, how your employees deal with safety hazards, etc. For this reason, you must come prepared with some questions you plan to ask your employees.

Although, if you are just doing a regular Gemba Walk to check how everything is going and not addressing anything in particular, you might need some general questions. Always try to have something ready to ask, as it will help you to gather details and track progress toward broader organizational goals or some desired improvements.

Schedule the Gemba Walk

With your questions ready, you should proceed with scheduling your Gemba Walk. You should pick a time when you can easily observe the workflow how you intend to. Try to check in with teams to determine when could be the best time to check how things might be.

If you can't reach with teams to define the day when you will do the Gemba Walk, always give your employees a heads up on what you will do. It will allow them to know what's going on and let them work naturally.

A Gemba Walk can take between 15 minutes to an hour or more. It will depend on your observation goals and the department to choose to observe. But it usually takes approximately 30 minutes to clearly visualize the activities of certain departments and how their workflow carries on. This time would be enough to give you a fair idea of the pain points that need to be addressed and what kind of improvements you could implement.

If it is the first time in the company that a Gemba Walk is performed, you can educate your team on what it means and what goals you are looking to accomplish with this practice. They must understand that this isn't a test performance or evaluation but rather a time leadership takes to understand daily work processes and consider general improvements.

Observe the Teams and Keep Record Without Interfering

Now it is time to make the Gemba Walk itself. Most of the time, it is conducted in person. Although, some teams might decide to do it via conference call or a coordinated video if they have very dispersed teams. Whatever the method, you must be able to clearly observe the different processes without interrupting or interfering.

You can ask any question on the run or ask for a deeper insight into some process but don't use this exercise to criticize or make changes on the spot. A Gemba Walk is done to watch, collect data, and develop a better understanding of the workflow.

Analyze Your Observations

While conducting your Gemba Walk, take notes and record answers for any questions you might have after. Collect as much information as you observe to help with your later analysis and reflections.

For this reason, you need to have a Gemba Walk checklist template ready to guide your way through the workplace and write down anything you need for the historical record. Then, as you reflect on your findings, you can work among other teams to think about solutions, goals, and improvements for certain areas.

This will provide a space for discussion and a moment to address any immediate action that must be taken if needed. It also will give your team a platform to share their suggestions and insights for the future.

Your Gemba Walk template should revolve around answering these three main questions:

• What Should Happen?: It will give you a better idea of the standard process, the rules employees must follow, and where the process is documented.
• What Actually Happened?: These are your recordings and observations. Check what happened. If there were some issues, what incident occurred, who discovered it, and how they affected workflow.
• Why It Happened?: It will involve all the parties involved if there is a problem. Together, they need to explain what happened (from their point of view) and get to the real cause of the issue. This explanation needs to be recorded and written down.

Now that you know the main concepts of a Gemba Walk and why you should do it at your organization, you need to have a checklist ready whenever you want to perform it.

Luckily you don't need specialized software or a Gemba Walk app to do so. You can do it well using Microsoft Excel, a simple and easy-to-learn program to create and edit different templates.

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Gemba Walk Template

This template is divided into three sections. The first one is where you will take notes about a certain process and its problems, with their description, type of problem, and the cause of this. The second table will help to lay down all the explanations of why this happened, along with a summary and your goals. And the last one is reserved for the solution and the actions and tools needed to solve this problem.

Download this Excel spreadsheet from CIToolKit.

Gemba Walk Checklist Template

If you want to go with a more "interviewer" approach, this template will help you with that. It is a series of questions that you might want to address to certain employees or staff members if you want to know more about a particular department. Then, you have a section to note down observations and the potential solutions and opportunities that you thought of.

Download it from CloudFront.net.

Gemba Walk Observation Data Worksheet Template

With this template, you can write down all the processes you observed with the time it takes to complete, perform a value analysis, do a yield analysis with any defect you may see, and use an additional field to leave some observations. All in one single page.

Download it from CIToolKit.

Gemba Walk Employee Data Worksheet Template

This template is done to observe and analyze larger processes that many employees are working on. It is a single table where you can interview all the employees, writing down their names, job descriptions, priority in the line of work, and how they are responding to it.

Download it from Praxie.

With any of these templates, you will be ready to perform your Gemba Walk into your workplace and better understand their different processes.

Always make up a meeting after your Gemba Walk, and let everyone speak their minds on how they think things can be improved over certain areas. Foster a collaborative environment within your teams so you will have a better time implementing improvements and identifying potential problems.