The anxieties and uncertainties people face after natural disaster strikes are legion. Will insurance cover our losses? What steps do we need to take to get help? How do I know the contractor we’re working with is legitimate? And most important: When will we be able to go home?
The St. Bernard Project, founded to help New Orleans-area residents rebuild after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, is dedicated to shortening the time between disaster and recovery. Training in Toyota’s production techniques has helped the nonprofit make real progress toward that goal, cutting the time it takes to rebuild a gutted house from 116 days to 60 days, a reduction of 48 percent.
The key to improving the organization’s construction process was to talk openly about problems, says Liz McCartney, who co-founded the St. Bernard Project with her now husband, Zack Rosenburg. She says the free guidance from the Toyota Production System Support Center, the company’s nonprofit training arm, helped the couple realize that they didn’t have to come up with all the answers themselves, that they could rely on the employees who were out building houses and supervising volunteers.
We learned that “if we turned to our team and allowed candid conversation to happen and framed the questions around, ‘How do we serve our clients better?’ they would help us come up with the solutions and figure out where we needed to improve,” says Ms. McCartney.
Greater Visibility
Toyota’s approach started with an in-depth analysis of the organization’s construction processes and whiteboards — lots and lots of whiteboards.
The nonprofit identified all the tasks involved in rebuilding a house, the steps to complete each task, and how long each task should take. Then the group posted a whiteboard at every construction site, and at the end of each day recorded whether the team was ahead or behind on its tasks.
“They pulled us out of the spreadsheets and onto public whiteboards,” says Mr. Rosenburg. “That way you can never get totally out of whack.”
At the same time, the organization used whiteboards to record tasks that weren’t completed properly the first time and had to be done a second — or even third — time, allowing leaders to identify common trouble spots.
Among the tasks that flummoxed staff and volunteers: installing the transition strips that join the floor in one room to the floor in an adjoining room.
“Each construction manager and site supervisor thought that it was their problem,” says Mr. Rosenburg. “But by keeping track, we saw that there was pattern.”
Once the problem was identified, the construction staff devised a new way of anchoring the strips.
In another case, the group narrowed in on a problem with leaky tub faucets that turned out to be a design flaw that the company manufacturing the faucets didn’t know about until the St. Bernard Project alerted it.
Standardizing Tasks
The analysis of the group’s construction process found that it had multiple ways to complete certain tasks. “We had three different ways of installing windows and three different ways of wiring a house, a couple different ways of sweating pipe together,” says Mr. Rosenberg.
To increase the nonprofit’s efficiency and make it easier for volunteers to plug into the system, the group standardized each task and created picture-based instructions for its construction manual.
Carrying out so many changes is difficult, even when people are deeply dedicated to the organization’s mission, says Mr. Rosenburg. That’s why it’s so important to talk openly about problems, he says, and leaders have to tap into that part of employees’ and volunteers’ psyche that is “hard-wired to fix and solve and help.”
“If we’re afraid to hold someone accountable, if we’re too soft, we’re not trusting them to make good decisions,” he says. “We have to get our culture right.”
The St. Bernard Project has shared what it’s learned by consulting with government officials and nonprofit leaders in other cities that have suffered disasters; creating an online guide to residential recovery; and rebuilding houses in Joplin, Mo., after the 2011 tornado and in New York and New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy struck in 2012.
Sadly, 10 years after Hurricane Katrina, the St. Bernard Project still has plenty of work to do in the New Orleans area.
Each week the organization receives more than 15 requests for help from people who can’t afford to rebuild their storm-damaged homes.
Says Mr. Rosenburg: “The demand to still come back is strong, if not stronger than ever.”
