Gemba Walk: when Vietnamese leaders leave their desks to discover how operations really run

At 8:45 in the morning, the CEO of a Vietnamese business walks into his own plant. No one has been booked to guide him. He carries no folder of documents. There is no agenda. Just a cup of coffee, a small notebook and ninety blocked-out minutes in his calendar.

In those ninety minutes, he does not try to solve any problem. He does not try to find faults. He does exactly one thing: walk and look. Through the materials receiving area. Along the assembly line. Through the packing area. Through the finished goods warehouse. He stops for a few minutes at each place. He exchanges a few words with the workers on the job. He writes a line in his notebook. He moves on.

This is a habit that operations management practitioners around the world call the Gemba Walk, or simply going to the floor. The concept itself is very simple: business leaders regularly leave their desks to go to where value is actually created. The practice is simple too. But the impact often far exceeds the expectations of leaders trying it for the first time.

"Gemba" is a Japanese word meaning the place where it happens. In operations management, Gemba refers to the place where value is actually created for customers: the plant floor for a manufacturer, the sales floor for a retail chain, the project office for a services business, the customer care center for a digital business. Every business has its own Gemba, and leaders usually know where it is, but the higher they rise, the less time they have to set foot there.

Between 2020 and 2022, remote work spread so widely that even leaders of manufacturing businesses spent most of their time behind a screen. Reports replaced observation. Video conferences replaced plant visits. Data dashboards replaced standing next to a running machine. When things returned to normal afterwards, many leaders realized something: they had lost their direct feel for their own business. The reports were still complete, but the old sense of walking a few steps on the shop floor and knowing right away that something was off was gone.

This is why the Gemba Walk is making a comeback as a management habit at many businesses around the world. Not because data dashboards have become worse, but because leaders have realized that data and direct observation complement each other rather than replace each other. A CEO who only looks at data sees numbers. A CEO who only walks the floor misses long-term trends. A CEO who does both sees the full picture.

Reports tell leaders what the business has achieved. Walking the floor tells leaders how the business is doing. The difference is that reports reflect last month, while the floor is the present. And the present often holds early signals that reports have not yet captured.

Leaders with a floor-walking habit often notice things that are very hard to see in a spreadsheet. A worker who has improvised a small tool to speed up a task, a sign that the standard procedure is not yet a good fit. A long queue at the packing station at 10 a.m., a sign of imbalance between process steps. A young employee re-explaining a procedure to a newcomer in their own words, a sign that successor talent is emerging naturally.

More important than the technical signals, walking the floor lets leaders sense the atmosphere of the business. Do people smile at each other? Are there conversations between departments? Does anyone pause as the leader walks by, looking as if they want to talk? None of this can be measured by any metric, yet it is the earliest signal of the health of the organization's culture.

Many leaders trying a Gemba Walk for the first time fall into a temptation: turning the walk into an inspection. When they see something not up to standard, they point it out immediately. They ask employees: "Why is this area so messy?" or "Who is responsible for this?". After a few times like that, no employee wants to talk openly with the leader on subsequent walks.

An effective Gemba Walk is not an inspection. It is observing and learning. The questions asked during the walk determine whether it creates value. Good questions are usually open, specific, and aimed at learning from the people doing the work.

These four questions have one thing in common: they all assume that the people doing the work understand it better than the leader does. This is respect expressed in words. When employees feel that respect, they share things no report could ever capture. This is the real value of the Gemba Walk.

An effective Gemba Walk does not need an elaborate program. On the contrary, the simpler the better. A habit that suits leaders of Vietnamese businesses usually has a very light structure.

Each week, the leader sets aside sixty to ninety minutes for a Gemba Walk. The time is fixed in the calendar and not pushed aside by other meetings. Go alone, without a guide. Bring a notebook, not a phone. Ask just one open question on that week's walk, not all four at once. Take notes after the walk, not during it. Above all, do not fix anything during the walk, because fixing things on the spot turns observation into inspection.

After the walk, the leader spends another thirty minutes processing the notes. Some observations become questions for the weekly meeting. Some become improvement projects for the relevant department. Some remain simply notes, waiting for next week's walk to see whether they recur. There is no need to act on every observation immediately. The power of the Gemba Walk lies in accumulation over time, not in immediate action.

Leaders who keep this habit for six months or more often notice a change not only in the business but in themselves. They make decisions faster because they have a foundation of direct observation. They are more confident discussing real operations with the board of directors. They connect better with the team because employees feel the leader truly knows how the business runs. These are benefits that forty PowerPoint reports a week cannot deliver.