ABSTRACT
Payroll can be complicated and, since payroll specialists are human, mistakes can occasionally happen. Work is a human system and Lean is a way to design more humanity into the system. Lean seeks to fix the management system, not the people in the system. Lean’s focus on management systems may appear to be coldly scientific and impersonal, but it is very caring and people-centric. Traditional management thinking, in contrast, focuses almost exclusively on people in an overly simple, cause-and-effect, reward-and-punish way. Deming estimated that 94% of problems in the workplace were problems with the management systems. That means that 6% of problems are due to other factors like, possibly, people. A people-centric culture is only obtained through improving the systems in which people work. A good system with just average people will outperform an uncoordinated collection of individual superstars every time.
