Saikiran Divakaruni

Engineering Manager

ZF Group

HOURS OF WORKLOAD WERE SAVED PER ENGINEER TO SHARE THE WORKLOAD

FULL-TIME EQUIVALENT SAVINGS OF USD 33,800

THE CHALLENGE

At The Legacy Leadership Consulting Group, we faced a critical challenge when our client, ZF, had to freeze hiring due to the current economic situation, resulting in an increased workload for the existing employees.

The situation led to overburdened and stressed employees, declining work-life balance, and adherence to ZF way principles such as passion, empowerment, and accountability. This reduction in commitment to ZF way principles could have eventually had an adverse impact on costs, employee and team morale, and the bottom line.

Therefore, the challenge was to mitigate this critical issue with the available employees, maintain the required quality standard, and still meet the management goals and customer expectations.

LEGACY LEADERSHIP SOLUTIONS

As our first step, we proposed an efficient solution to alleviate the workload burden on the current team members while promoting employee morale and accountability within the team. Said solution involved deploying at least two engineers to spend 5 hours per week (totaling 10 hours per week) working in a different team while fulfilling their job functions.

This approach could save a minimum of 0.25 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) per week for each team. Moreover, this arrangement added the benefit of boosting employee morale in the current and new teams.

To make this experiment successful, we implemented several countermeasures that addressed the root cause analysis and classified them into an effort vs. impact chart. The countermeasures included ensuring the accuracy of time booking, WLP inputs, and PR assignments, assigning easy/repetitive work to borrowed engineers, assigning meaningful projects to new engineers, and discussing the time saved with existing employees to maintain their work/life balance or utilize that time for some other essential projects.

RESULTS

The experiment was conducted for eight weeks, focusing on two projects, each lasting 4 weeks. The progress was tracked using clarity time booking, aiming to reduce a minimum of 5 hours or more from each employee’s time booking and minimize overtime.

Following the experiment, several positive results were obtained. Firstly, a minimum of 5 hours of workload was saved per engineer to share the workload, resulting in a 0.25 FTE (Full Time Equivalent) savings of USD 33,800. Secondly, the employee morale had increased on both sides – for the engineers who helped with the experiment and those who received help. Lastly, the accuracy and timeliness of the engineer’s time booking and PR assignments had improved, reducing the workload of engineers in the team and enhancing their work-life balance.

With our Legacy Leadership Lab, we successfully provided an efficient solution to mitigate the critical issue faced by ZF. The solution alleviated employee overburden, enhanced morale, and promoted accountability within the team, leading to positive results.

The Legacy Leadership Lab’s approach effectively optimized the utilization of human resources within the team and neighboring teams while providing motivated engineers with the opportunity to learn and explore new concepts and opportunities within ZF.