Employee competencies can be clustered to determine
- Recruitment requirements
- Staff scheduling
- Training plans
- Succession plans
- Budget pay for performance
- Worker Risks for occupational injury
JSS builds employee competencies into 7 Domains of Highly Successful Employees:
- Knowledge
- Psychological
- Biomechanics
- Sensory
- Strength/Stamina
- Safety
- Quality
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The Six Sigma competencies are industry specific knowledge, psychology, biomechanics, sensory, strength and stamina, safety, and quality. How they are best communicated? Competency based job descriptions are the foundation of Six Sigma communication. The seven competencies integrate Six Sigma with productivity, safety, and quality.Knowledge: There are minimally five knowledge competencies required of Six Sigma employees. They are the ability to
- Identify the problem in a process
- Charter a project to specifically address the process
- Plan the process evaluation
- Work through the project guidelines to improve the process
- Application of DMAIC, which stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control
Psychology: Implementation of knowledge competencies is done on teams who must have psychological competencies. Teams count and therefore psychological competencies are important. In the words of Jack Welch, past-Chairman of GE, Six Sigma is "The only program I've ever seen where the customer is part of the team and where employees are engaged in and rewarded by the quality of the process." Psychological competencies are defined in terms of increased customer satisfaction, which requires communication skills. Example psychological competencies are the ability to
- Listen closely to customers complaints and compliments
- Communicate with coworkers even in conflicted situations
- Present effective solutions from diverse perspectives
- Decide using consensual decision making techniques
Biomechanics: The Six Sigma biomechanical competencies penetrate the work processes-- applying to all physical demands within an organization
- Lifting, carrying, and placing product on the production line to conformance
- Reaching to adjust a control to specified range
Sensory: The Six Sigma sensory competencies penetrate the work processes-- applying to all visual, auditory, olfactory, taste, and sensation demands in the work environment. Examples are
- Visual as in color inspection to prevent 're-work' in a batch of a product
- Sensation as in documenting the adhesion of a label to a rounded surface
Strength and Stamina: The Six Sigma strength and stamina competencies penetrate the work processes-- applying to all demands that may cause fatigue for employees within job tasks
- Increasing repetitions per minute, using a full range of motion of the body to maintain delivery time.
Safety: The safety culture of Six Sigma suggests that a safe work environment positively affects quality of work life. Safety competencies reflect excellence. In Six Sigma cultures high safety values are implemented to achieve safety goals. For example, a Six Sigma safety target is preventing accidents using near miss data. Safety competencies are defined in terms of increased worker satisfaction, which requires competencies that go beyond regulations such as industry specific
- Job Safety Analysis
- Ergonomics
- Near Miss Solutions
Quality: Six Sigma's goal is to raise customer satisfaction by reducing the number of defectives from a process to 3.4 defectives per million. Competent employees are the key to progress towards the targeted measurements of the sigma rating. What this means in Six Sigma is that people who have the quality competency understand and apply
- Techniques of data gathering
- Calculations
- Statistics of target standards.
JSS documents "Meet the Mission" job title requirements by employee understanding that can be demonstrated by 20 Baldrige factors:
- Communication
- Environment (organizational, physical, technical)
- Ethics
- Finance
- Growth
- Guests
- Knowledge
- Leadership
- Legal rules
- Patients
- Process Management
- Quality
- Research
- Results
- Safety
- Service
- Strategic Planning>
- Work Force People