Engage Your Employees – an Employee-Driven Process

If you have followed our process, by now you have uncovered those tangled processes in your business that lead to customer and employee frustration and profitability loss. You identified how your employees can work together in a more understanding and trusting environment that promotes accountability, innovation, and productivity; however, your path toward continuous improvement is just beginning.

Enter Kaizen

The concept of Kaizen, the Japanese word for improvement, needs to be part of an organization’s long-term competitive strategy because companies that implement Kaizen continually yield superior results.

three workers talking about work process Kaizen means continuous improvement in all aspects of your life, but when applied to the workplace, Kaizen means continuous improvement, which involves everyone eliminating waste in business processes. Kaizen helps to

  • improve efficiency,
  • create standardized work processes,
  • reduce cost,
  • improve teamwork, and
  • boost productivity.

In fact, two of the five principles of Kaizen are that everyone in the organization should be aiming to

  1. create value and
  2. eliminate waste.

Your employees must understand your processes in detail and have the freedom and autonomy to make small incremental changes toward their improvement. And, your employees should be empowered with the tools, knowledge, training, and skills to allow them to complete their job to their full capability. Engaging your employees in an environment of trust, accountability, and innovation drives employees to want to be part of building a better workplace because they are physically, emotionally, and psychologically engaged in your business.

Other continuous improvement principles

two workers reviewing customer data

  • Know your customer, whether they be organizationally internal or external.
  • Identify customer needs and add value to the customer experience.
  • Use real and transparent data that shows tangible and visible performance improvements.
  • Utilize the employees who do the work to advise management on potential changes that need to be made to improve the process, known as “Going to Gemba.”

So, why do companies miss out on this huge benefit to organizational growth and development?

  • Employees are not provided with the necessary training and knowledge to allow them to fully immerse themselves in their job role.
  • Employee suggestions for improvements are ignored, leading to a mentality and culture of apathy.
  • Fear of failure because the organization is not accepting and supportive of failure.
  • Employees are trained and then they are not afforded the opportunity to utilize their new skills.
  • Those employees who are fundamental to the process are not involved in process development and improvement because “management knows better.”
  • Once improvements are implemented, there is no control and monitoring plan in place to ensure the people and the process improvement does not fall back to the “old” ways of operating.
  • The company believes it is performing well enough that it doesn’t have to eliminate waste.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but over the years these are the main reasons why I have seen productive indifference pervade an organization.

So what’s the final step?

The icing on the cake is that as part of your continuous improvement program you empower your employees to Kaizen. Provide them what they need to properly do their job fully and capably and continue to do so. This is not a “one off” event.

Secondly, have a comprehensive Lean Six Sigma Control, monitoring in place to ensure all stakeholders understand and conform to the new, improved process. Then, include a detailed response plan to ensure that if the process begins to trend “out of control”, clear and comprehensive measures are put into action to bring the process back to normal as quickly as possible.

The Engage phase helps employees understand their value to the organization and what their contribution really means…it makes their involvement personal.

Need help?

At Engagement Academy Partners, we partner with your organization to involve employees personally in long term continuous process improvement resulting in significantly increased engagement and innovation, reduced turnover, improved efficiency, productivity, and profitability. Connect with us today and let’s work to improve your tomorrow.