CAPITAL TIMES - MARCH 1999

GE Financial Assurance:

GEFA is a dynamic, integrated family of investment and insurance companies with operations in North America, Europe and Japan. A financial security solutions provider, GEFA helps consumers accumulate, preserve, and protect wealth over a lifetime. GEFA products and services allow consumers to achieve desired financial goals during each stage of their lives.

What is Work-Out™?

Work-Out is a name GE gives to a problem-solving process. A Work-Out is based on the concept of a Town Hall meeting. In a Work-Out, people who are close to the problem or issue to be solved meet using a defined format and process to generate solutions. The participants might be employees, customers and/ or suppliers. Because of its simplicity and its effectiveness, it has become an important part of GE’s culture.

To the 1,200 employees at Independent Brokerage Group in Lynchburg, Va., the term “work out” meant “something you do in a gym” before the organization was acquired by GE Financial Assurance (GEFA) in 1996.

But since then, Work-Out™ has quickly become the tool to boost capacity, integrate processes and cut out unnecessary cost. Beyond the better process quality and nearly $1 million in freed-up capacity, participants say their work lives are better too.

“Our Work-Out improved communication within the Information Technology area,” explained senior programmer/analyst Brenda Morton. “We’ve streamlined processes, short-ened our turnaround time to help customers and learned to quickly launch and finish projects.”

In Lynchburg’s second two-day Work-Out, underwriter Becky Steiner found herself part of a “customer engagement” team, a blending of underwriting and new business departments. “It was easy for us to function in our own little worlds, so by coming together as a ‘customer engagement’ group, we learned to work together better," Stieiner explained. "The big benefit to the business was freeing up time to serve customers better and faster. The big benefit to us was solving our problems ourselves — they weren’t solved for us.”

Bob Vick, human resources leader, says grass-roots decision-making is key to Work-Out success and follow-through.

To launch Work-Out, Vick said IBG asked highly experienced facilitators from GEFA headquarters to help plan the initial session. Participants spent two days away from work — a cost of roughly $50,000 — and pin-pointed projects that met the criteria for implementation: it could take no longer than six weeks, add no new resources and could require no more than eight hours of additional time for each person. Within a few months, the projects had freed up $850,000 in time that allowed the IT group to take on new work.

“Work-Out naturally sets the stage for quality,” explained IT leader and vice president Scott McKay. “Work-Out creates a more efficient process. Six Sigma can then take that process to even higher levels or restructure it altogether."

Work-Out is the method of choice for change at GEFA. At the
Lynchburg Work-Out from left to right: P.J. Gramatges, Michael
Aruck, Jean Sumner, Amy Heppner (standing), and Joyce Wurth.

The success of that first session has led to subsequent Work-Outs in customer engagement and product servicing coordination with another GEFA site. Added Vick: “We pulled together three successful Work-Outs in seven months, so when the need arises in 1999 for this kind of action, Work-Out will be the method of choice again.”