What is visual management?

Visual management is one of those essential elements of our professional and personal lives that many of us accept without a second thought, perhaps without even noticing it. But once you understand what visual management truly entails—and what it encompasses—you will see it everywhere!

Visual management is a way to visually communicate expectations, performance, standards, or warnings in a manner that requires little to no prior training to interpret. You may have heard this term used within your company, particularly on factory floors, but it is actually applied in all sorts of everyday scenarios. In fact, you have likely already used dozens of visual management tools today without even realizing it.

So, what is visual management?

There are various categories of visual management that enable enhanced control over standards, performance, and quality. This ranges from simple factual communication to the use of visual controls designed to prevent errors. These categories include:

Sharing Information

The first category of visual management is information sharing. This is something you will frequently encounter in the workplace, with a common example being a simple bulletin board.

The visual management examples featured on the display board include charts showing monthly performance summaries, customer survey results, the team’s key achievements and perhaps a list of suggestions from the team.

Another example, which you may also use in your own organization, is color coding. The most common system is that of traffic lights, where red serves as a warning, yellow signals the need for caution, and green indicates that everything is on track (a system universally understood due to its use in road signaling). The key here is that everyone must understand the information being communicated by the colors without needing to ask for clarification. The definitions must be clear. If they have to ask, it is not effective visual management, it is merely decorative.

Sharing Standards

Next comes the sharing of standards. The idea here is to communicate information, much like the process described above, but in cases where a task is performed regularly and must adhere to a specific standard.

Imagine you work at the fictional Newzy Shop and have been tasked with designing a storefront window. Corporate headquarters wants all store windows across the country to be identical. To achieve this, they send out written instructions, but more importantly, photos or sketches illustrating exactly how they should look.

In this case, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Implementing Standards

The logical next step after sharing standards is to ensure that deviating from them is difficult. This is precisely what we achieve in visual management by integrating these standards. Workplace examples may include templates that you can use to create documents Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.

To prevent any anomalies

The final category of visual management can also be viewed as steps to prevent errors. Some of these are so simple that you may be surprised you hadn’t thought of them. This stage aims to prevent a problem from occurring in the first place, rather than merely providing information or a warning that requires someone to take action.

A fantastic example is the window envelope. Window envelopes utilize the name and address printed directly on the letter itself, preventing the wrong address from being written on the outside of the envelope. It becomes impossible for the letter to reach the wrong recipient, as there is a clear visual indication of the correct recipient’s identity, leaving no other alternative.

Another example is that of aircraft lavatories : The light in the cabin does not turn on until the door has been locked, forcing users to lock the door and preventing other passengers from opening it while it is occupied. All of this occurs while simultaneously preventing the light from turning on.

Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best!