Getting everyone involved in improvement

Why idea schemes go wrong

“Kaizen”, or continuous improvement, accomplished by lots of small improvements by everyone in an organisation, is well recognised and accepted as foundational to sustainable business success.

Despite knowing this, and even believing in it, many organisations struggle to implement effective and sustainable schemes to accomplish this.  I have heard many tales of bad experiences with such schemes, and have identified a number of common problems:

• Ideas captured lack context and/or detail, so are difficult to evaluate and prioritise

• Front line employees are reluctant to contribute ‘small ideas’ fearing they have no grand insights to offer

• People don’t hear anything back, so feel they’ve wasted their time and disengage

• Assessment teams are overwhelmed with the number of ideas and can’t process them all

• Front line teams are not involved in solutions, so ideas don’t generate real or lasting commitment to continuous improvement

• The scheme is mainly used to raise gripes or grumbles, especially where they are anonymous

Digging deeper into the causes of the above, we find that people are given little or no guidance about how to think about and record their ideas and problems, or that insufficient thought is given to how those ideas generated will be managed.

More fundamentally, organisations often fail to consider why employees might want to embrace such a scheme and hope to gain from it

The “Getting everyone involved in improvement” guide

In order to help you create an effective employee ideas and problems scheme that will deliver the benefits and avoid the pitfalls, I have created a guide called "Getting everyone involved in improvement" which you can download here for a small administrative charge.

The download comprises a written introduction to the principles and processes involved in creating an effective ideas scheme.  In addition there are detailed guides to the individual steps, like the one you shown here.