How to Foster the Adoption of Lean and Six Sigma in the Sharing Economy?

Successful business like Uber and Airbnb prove that the sharing economy is here to stay. An increasing number of customers are now able to get services that are more affordable and available for everyone. But what about the quality of these new offerings?

Today, you can travel by ride-sharing with Uber, eat at someone else’s house with Cookapp, rent your empty rooms on Airbnb, or communicate with a client on the other side of the world for free with WhatsApp, Skype, or Google Hangouts. A few years ago, you would have never considered sharing a book before publishing it, but today a lot of companies offer their e-books for free or promote free chapters. Even conferences and high-quality expert talks are now available for free, like the Ted Talks platform and a handful of webinars on-line.

All these new companies and strategies are centered on sharing resources and offering more affordable products to a greater number of customers. In the hyper-connected world we live in, people are beginning to feel the need for human contact again, and face-to-face connections and closer partnerships are becoming more popular. Millennials -members of generation Y- the youngest generation of consumers, born between 1980 and the early 2000s- want services that are tailor-made to meet their unique needs. For instance, instead of 5 star hotels, where you don’t always get to talk to the manager, Millennials prefer boutique apartment-type lodgings where you can talk to the owner, get homemade pancakes, or share a family room.  

Work satisfaction

As it turns out, Millennials are also looking for very different things from a job, and want varied, interesting experiences from work. A Harvard Business Review research shows that happy employees have, on average, 31% higher productivity; their sales are 37% higher, and their creativity is 3X higher. Researchers at Gallup have found that retail stores that scored higher on employee life satisfaction generated $21 more in earnings per square foot of space than the other stores, adding $32 million in additional profits to the entire chain.

One of the differentiators of Millennials is that they look forward to joining companies which have a culture that matches their values. Fostering the implementation of quality methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma can help us in this journey, but we need to make sure we consider millennials’ needs so that they really embrace the quality culture. Peer-to-peer moneymaking opportunities exist all around us but, in order to ensure sustainability of these businesses, product and service quality are still key. More than one-in-three American workers today is a Millennial (adults aged 18 to 34 in 2015), and this year they surpassed Generation X to become the largest single demographic of the American workforce, according to new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.


 


In order to foster quality practices in any kind of company that offers a service or a manufactured product, quality needs to be part of the culture.

Culture develops over time, and best practices are generally learnt by example, so the reinforcement of behaviors is key in its design. Even though all businesses already have a culture set, sometimes it may not be of the right kind to achieve the objectives defined in the annual plans or to succeed in the new economy, so new behaviors need to be learnt and promoted.

Fostering a new culture

I have found out that there are 5 main behaviors that need to be fostered in a company by HR to allow a quality culture to flourish at the same time as a sharing philosophy. I call these 5 behaviors the sharing culture set: 

 

 
How does your culture look like right now? What are your main barriers towards achieving performance?