How to Prepare Your Team for a Gemba Walk

Disclosure: M365.FM host Mirko Peters works at iFAKT GmbH. This page describes the company factually; paid partnerships and links are labelled as advertising.

By Mirko Peters · 2026-11-11

Gemba walk preparation starts with the team. Learn what to tell people, when to say it and how to engage the shop floor so the walk builds trust and not fear.

To prepare your team for a gemba walk, tell people why you are coming, what you will do, who will join and what happens with the notes, before you take the first step. This article is for plant managers who are starting walks or whose walks are met with silence or tension. It covers gemba walk preparation for the team and for you, a sample message, a way to brief all shifts and the mistakes that make walks feel like inspections. Gemba is Japanese for "actual place", the place where work is done.

Key points

• Prepare the team before you prepare the route. People who know why you are coming and what you will do with what you learn are open instead of defensive.
• Tell the team five things: the purpose, the area and time, who will come, what you will ask and what will happen with the notes.
• Use the briefing slots you already have, such as shift start meetings, so that preparing the walk costs minutes and not extra meetings.
• Prepare yourself too. Learn the basics of the area, define a purpose and look at your own communication style before you go.
• Close the loop after the first walk. Teams believe the next announcement only if the last walk led to something they can see.

Why gemba walk preparation starts with the team

A gemba walk only works if people show you the normal work. If they fear the walk, they show you a cleaned-up version of a real place. Direct observation, the "go and see" of lean management, needs real work in front of you. With a staged area you learn little, and you also teach them that your visits are something to survive.

Flávio Battaglia of Lean Institute Brasil makes the same point in the Planet Lean article Gemba walks and manager behaviour: a well-intentioned but poorly structured trip to the gemba can do serious damage. He advises leaders to be clear about the purpose before they go, and to tell people why they are coming.

There is a second reason. The Toyota phrase "go see, ask why, show respect", which the Lean Enterprise Institute attributes to chairman Fujio Cho, puts respect in the same sentence as observation. Preparation is where respect starts. A team that was told the purpose, the time and the plan has been treated as partners. A team that was not told has been treated as an object of study. Trust also underpins continuous improvement, because people only suggest changes to a manager they trust.

What to tell the team before the walk

Communicating a gemba walk takes five points. You can say them in two minutes.

1. Purpose. "I want to understand how orders for product family X move through this area, and what slows them down."
2. Area and time. "Tomorrow, around 10:00, for about 30 minutes, in assembly and the test area."
3. Who comes. "Me and our planner. Nobody from outside."
4. What you will do. "I will watch the work and ask questions about the process. I will not judge anyone."
5. What happens with what I learn. "We will pick one or two problems together, and I will report back next week."

Say it in person to the team leaders and again at the start of the shift. Keep a short written version on the area board. Avoid corporate language. "Today we are doing a process review" sounds like an audit. "I want to learn how the work goes" does not.

One more habit helps: tell people what you will not do. You will not take photos of individuals, you will not write down names and you will not give orders at the station. These promises are small, but they remove the biggest fears.

How to prepare yourself

Your own preparation matters as much as the team's. Battaglia lists practices that fit here:

• Define a purpose. Write one sentence for what you want to learn. A shared purpose, he writes, enables communication.
• Understand the context. Learn the basics of the area before you go: the products, the flow and the main measures. Visiting without this knowledge, he warns, can distort the problems you identify.
• Calibrate your mindset. Be present and look past the surface. Look at your own communication and style too.

Prepare a short checklist of three to five open questions for the factory floor, and share the questions with the team leaders. Include one about standard work, the agreed best-known way of doing a task: "Can you show me how this step is done?" If practice and standard differ, that is an improvement opportunity and a reason to look for the root cause, not a mistake by the operator.

Add two practical steps. First, check your calendar. A walk that you cancel twice teaches the team that it does not matter. Second, decide beforehand what you will do with what you learn, and who you will speak to if you find a safety issue.

Mike Orzen's Lean Enterprise Institute article How to lead with respect lists gemba observation, active listening and learning as a leader among seven practices of leading with respect. Use that list as a self-check. If you plan to talk more than listen, change the plan.

How to engage the shop floor in the walk

Shop floor engagement is not a speech. It is a set of small, repeated signals.

• Involve team leaders and supervisors early. Ask them what the walk should look at. They know the area, and the walk becomes theirs too.
• Invite operators to explain their work. Ask a question that only they can answer, such as "What would you change first?" Then listen.
• Ask for improvement ideas, and act on one. Teams take ownership when they see an idea used. A kaizen, a small improvement made close to the work by the people who run it, is a good first outcome because it is quick and visible.
• Thank people in public and fix things in private. Praise good practice at the board. Take problems to the people who can solve them, not to the whole group.
• Keep the same message each time. Repeating the purpose builds trust. Changing it every week looks like a hidden agenda.

After the walk, agree a short action plan with the supervisors and team leaders: one or two improvement opportunities, each with an owner and a date. Senior leaders should hear the result, but they should not take the actions over. The same plan can list improvement ideas from the team that are not yet ready to start.

You may also invite someone from the team to join you for part of the walk. This is a strong signal of respect and gives you a view you would not otherwise get.

Example: briefing three shifts

This is an illustrative example with made-up numbers. A plant has three shifts with 12 people each, so 36 people in the area. The plant manager wants every person to hear the briefing.

Option A: an extra meeting for everyone. A 30-minute meeting per shift means 36 people × 0.5 hours = 18 person-hours. Production also stops during the meeting.

Option B: use the existing shift start meeting. Each shift already holds a 5-minute meeting. The manager joins all three and speaks for 5 minutes each time.

• Manager time: 3 × 5 minutes = 15 minutes.
• Team time: 36 people × 5 minutes = 180 minutes = 3 person-hours.

Option B costs 15 fewer person-hours than option A: 18 − 3 = 15. It also reaches the night shift, which often misses special meetings. The manager adds one line on the area board and asks each team leader to repeat the message to anyone who was absent.

The saving is small, but the effect matters. People hear the message in a familiar setting, from their own team leader, and the manager shows that the walk is part of normal work and not an event.

Common mistakes

• Surprise visits as a test. You see a tense version of the work and teach people to hide problems.
• A vague message. "I'll come by" invites suspicion. State purpose, area, time and what you will do.
• Briefing only managers. Operators hear the news from rumours, and rumours are rarely kind.
• Staging the area. If people clean up for you, say that you want to see the normal state, and mean it.
• Announcing a plan and then cancelling. Walks that disappear teach that the plan was not serious.
• No report back. If the team never hears what happened to what they said, they will say nothing next time.

How software can help

Preparation needs facts: where flow is slow, which orders are late and which areas have changed. A dashboard or a production data model can show these facts before you go, so your purpose can be specific. iFAKT is a Stuttgart-based consulting company and software specialist for Industry 4.0, founded in 2001. It develops the Polaris production software, which combines ERP data with a digital twin of manufacturing and AI to optimize production schedules, reveal bottlenecks and improve on-time delivery. The data helps you ask better questions; the team still has to tell you why.

Next step

Write your five-point message for one area today and deliver it at the next shift start meeting. After the first walk, report back within a week on what you learned and what will change, because that report is the best gemba walk preparation for the next one.