7 Steps to Implement a Gemba Walk Structure

The first step is to put the company’s organizational chart up to date to determine who oversees what department (and who). The best tool to do so is probably Visio from Microsoft, but Lucidchart can do the job just fine for free. It is critical to define clear roles and responsibilities at this stage.

The top executive holds a meeting with all the team leaders, presenting the Gemba Walk and explaining why it’s useful for them. This step is vital to reduce resistance to change.

In collaboration with each team leaders, create a list of verification points that they must validate with every work units in their department every two hours. Always remember, these checklists must aim to identify and reduce waste. It is important that the workers know that the Team leaders are performing these Gemba Walks to help them and find solutions, not to punish them.

Set-up a recurring 4 times per day event in the team leaders’ schedule so that they don’t forget to do their Gemba walks. For level 2 management, a Gemba Walk should be performed twice per day.

Shadow every team leaders’ Gemba walk individually at least once a week to make sure they carry it out in the right way.

At least once a week, set a recurring meeting in the team leaders’ schedule to be carried out with the plant manager. The goal of this meeting is to follow up on improvement plans that are in progress and create new ones from the new improvement opportunities they found during the past week. Your team leaders might tell you they don’t have time, but they must understand they’ll save time by preventing problems through Gemba Walks rather than solving them after they happen.

Remember, we are trying to achieve continuous improvement, which means these practices should be carried out every day. We strongly recommend setting goals for how many new improvement opportunities each team leaders should come up with every week. We recommend setting the goal to 2 new improvement opportunities per week per team leader.