Organizational Structure for TPM Organizations

 TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) is a methodology based on improving equipment and improving people, to reach the second condition is mandatory to build an organizational structure to facilitate the autonomy of workers and their alignment with the organization's mission, vision, and values.

 In this way, the company Spotify classifies the teams in four quadrants based on their level of autonomy and alignment with the organizational goals, reach the high-high quadrant allows the achievement of goals in a more creative and efficient way by exploiting the potential of all the people involved in the project.

From Spotify.

 This approach is based on the Douglas McGregor Theory X and Theory Y, in which Theory X suppose that:

·   The average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can.

·   Most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, and threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort toward the achievement of organizational objectives.

·  The average human being prefers to be directed, wishes to avoid responsibility has relatively little ambition, and wants security above all.

 As can be seen, these conditions of the Theory X could be assimilated to the Spotify quadrants with low autonomy or low alignment.

 On the other hand, Theory Y proposes the integration of individual and organizational based in:

·   The expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest, and the average human being does not inherently dislike work.

·   Man will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which he is committed.

·  The satisfaction of ego and self-actualization needs can be direct products of efforts directed toward organizational objectives.

·   The average human being learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept but to seek responsibility.

·   The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.

·   Under the conditions of modern industrial life, the intellectual potentialities of the average human being are only partially utilized. 

 In the same line, Frederick Laloux in his book Reinventing Organizations proposes an evolution of the organizational structure of companies from impulsive organizations, based on the division of labor and command authority, to Teal organizations based on self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose.

 According to this author, evolutionary or Teal organizations are based on these basic assumptions:

·   Trust, 

·   Information and decision-making, 

·   Responsibility and accountability, 

·   Equal worth, 

·   Safe and caring workplace, 

·   Overcoming separation, 

·   Learning, 

·   Relationships and conflict, 

·   Collective purpose,

·   Individual purpose,

·   Planning the future, 

·   Profit.

 A way to obtain this evolution is by exploiting the principles of Visual Management, so all the workers involved in the process hold real-time information needs to make decisions based on their individual and collective goals, and the responsibility to report in a transparent manner its performance with the target to improve benefits.

 By a Visual Management Dashboard workers report their own results and performance, the level of goals fulfillment, the work planning including the days-off planning, needs for qualifications, etc.

 Example of Visual Management Dashboard, from Michel Greif - The Visual Factory.

 These boards could be complemented with Kanban dashboards specifics for every project, these boards show openly and transparently the flow of work in real-time, show the process weakness, support to manage flow, make policies explicit and identify improvement opportunities.

  Congruent with these tools, we find the Spotify organizational structure, a floating and changing structure, based on individuals, with the following elements:

·   Squads, a small team to be 6 to 12 persons that work together towards a long-term mission.

·   Tribes, a group of several squads to be 40 to 100 persons, focused on a process, with a leader. 

·   Chapters, a horizontal structure formed based on competency areas.

·   Guilds, a non-formal structure or community of interests where the people across the whole company gather and share knowledge of a specific area.

 These structures are changing, even the role of the leader can change in every project, this system provides autonomy to involved persons and allows them to participate and focus on their own areas of interest, the areas where it can add the most value.

 As a summary, we could consider that TPM is the self-actualizing management, once the first stages of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs are fulfilled, they are physiological needs, safety needs, belonging needs, and esteem needs; because it considers the following key principles:

·   Work is a type of psychological therapy for satisfying our desire for self-actualization.

·  People and works are in a cyclic relationship; people grow and develop through their work, bringing prosperity to their companies and that prosperity leads to further individual development.

·   When people find a purpose in though their work, they become ever more passionate about it. 

 For an organization, to startup this type of organizational structure improves the velocity and simplifies processes, eliminates dependencies, makes easy troubleshooting, minimizes the hierarchy control and changes to self-control, promotes quality and transparency, and create a positive work climate.