Where Innovation Matters

Without good, clear, effective, and timely communication as to the demands of the marketplace, and the ability of any one of the business entities in a company to respond, a company can only hope for good luck, patient customers, and understanding employees.

Reengineer Your Systems: In simple terms, our approach is to (1) help you re-engineer your internal systems quickly; (2) inspire and train your employees to fully embrace any new system; and (3) assure full participation and creative involvement of every team member or employee using performance measures and incentives.

We Make Sure Your Systems Work: We use our expertise in management systems to help you implement strategic changes in your operating systems. We have no agenda to "sell" you the perfect system. You decide what best suits your company needs; we make sure it works. We create the necessary linkage that assures full accountability.

Maintaining Clear Vision: Use of the Employee Self-Management system will allow everyone in your company to begin resolving any-and-all points of conflict. Employee Self-Management is a tool to focus on what is wrong with the system, helping employees give up looking for who is to blame. The "blame-game" is a habit. It is a "resistance" that we addressed earlier. When we examine the resistance of blame, we can see that jumping to blame someone is in reality a desire for action to change the problem.  Unfortunately it is an action that often creates or perpetuates the problem.

Work-Flow Mapping: One of the most common problems of shared work environments is the misperception that everyone knows how the work of various teams is done. This is seldom so. The tools provided by Employee Self-Management allow everyone to easily map their workflow. We suggest flow-charts, as they are easy to produce and easy to read. If you can do your job, you can also make a map that shows others how you do what you do. When you are able to map your daily work patterns for co-workers, it becomes much easier for them to see how your work depends on theirs. When all related employees bring their maps to a team meeting, the intersecting points are obvious, and potential problems are addressed before the work is in process.

Flow-Charting Your Processes: Flow-charts that describe your teams, team assignments, scheduling and planning requirements, and examples of work-flow methods help everyone understand how the cause and effect of one's actions impact another's job. Developing these flow-charts for one's assignments provides a way to communicate and get agreement about what most needs to be done, and how to best do the work. This brings us to the last principle of the Employee Self-Management triad:

1. In your communication systems;
2. In your accountability systems; and
3. In your performance evaluation systems.

Vagueness costs you money through unprofitable action.  Vagueness lowers productivity, quality, and morale. By eliminating vagueness in your systems, employees come to understand the difference between "jargon" and teamwork.
The alternative to independence, self-determination, and interdependence is "policing" the work-group or team. People who are "policed" often retreat by using vagueness as a strategy to avoid blame or attack, and the cycle of wasted action continues.

Without an operating system that establishes clear self-management guidelines for independence, self-determination, and interdependence of the individual, the true gains of a team approach cannot be fully realized. We believe that withoutEmployee Self-Management, you are in fact, paying your people to be ineffective.

MCTS guides you through the development of "peopleware" management systems to facilitate achievement of your company's strategic directives. "Peopleware" is a term we use to describe the skills needed to successfully integrate information technology into the human work environment.
"Peopleware" is a much neglected but crucial factor for success in business today. Business now has access to the finest hardware, software, and technical support ever developed, yet due to "peopleware" problems, these technologically advanced systems often deliver less than optimal results.

We Introduce New Systems: There are many tools now available that can be used as objective planning/reporting systems that take the discussion of "Best" out of the old opinion-based observation method and established clear objective measures. For this change to clear objective measures to be realized, everyone must be willing to re-evaluate their views on what is "best" for the company.

Properly structured work relationships will greatly reduce employee turnover. The chance for individual success and therefore company or team success is greatly increased by the advantages of clear objective measures.

By re-designing your company's internal system of operations, the groundwork will be in place for what comes next. Again, for this ground work to be of use, there must be shared vision and agreement as to what the system is, how it works, and who is responsible for each action.

Whenever and wherever the employee can be actively engaged, in stages of design as well as implementation, the result will be greater commitment to the new system. This will mean smoother transitions, less unproductive "down-time" and more employee participation guaranteeing full integration and utilization of new systems.