Business Improvement = Employee Engagemement
During my time in management and indeed as an employee, one tool that I have found useful in business is the power of employee engagement, ensuring your staff feel engaged with the business is a powerful tool helping the business be more productive and employees feeling more valued.
Whats the best way to engage employees? Simple running a business improvement project with your staff that they are in control of will help them feel engaged with the business and at the same time the business will benefit from some constructive ideas that may well help improve your business, after all your staff from all different levels will understand where the business needs to improve it may be as simple as installing new PC's or as simple as re-decorating the office and workplace.
The key to business improvement is to not call it business improvement, and to provide some form of responsibility to your staff. You can start by Re-branding it as a new project under a different name such as the project that I had run when in management 'the get involved project' employees will no doubt have already been involved in a project like this before, the difference with your project is that instead of it being the stereotypical ‘business improvement project’ where employees feel that the same processes and ideas are being followed to improve a business, create a sense of new direction, with a new project.
The get involved project that I ran had one soul purpose, Improve the business in a way that employees feel valued, in a process where the employees make the improvements, the employees are creating ideas, and taking ownership of their ideas and managers are there only to provide resources and guide and advice the employees of the best direction for business.
- Make business improvement a team effort involve all levels of people from normal staff to managers, make it fun - promote with colourful posters and emails to drive interest, and make it open - all ideas are good ideas but it must be realistic and relevant.
- Always outline any ideas or improvements gained previously in similar projects, providing a sense of achievement early on in your project this also allows everyone to see an overall view of what other improvements may be needed.
- Ensure everyone is heard and that all ideas are considered, if the idea doesn't work then explain why it wont work and what else may work, positive engagement and feedback allows for a positive improvement team.
- Ensure a clear structured process is in place when planning and creating ideas, setting out clear goals, owners and actions, the planning stage is the most important and is where you improvements will blossom from.
- The last Important factor I feel is, that you must display and give visibility of the improvements and progress to the wider team, I had a dedicated wallboard with colourful updates and posters of our progress for all to see including staff and clients, whilst sending out an email update is simple, it can be forgotten quite quickly, we want the staff to see our improvements and be apart of the process of course I also sent out a weekly email update of what has been discussed in our workshops and meetings
Business Improvement is not just a way to Improve your business, Its an effective tool that can be used to engage your work force to create a sense of belonging and community within your business, increase productivity, and help your business be the best that it can.
Side note - Why do I feel that this is effective? two businesses that I have worked with have implemented this methodology to their businesses, one being large multinational company that is global, and one being a ￡3.3million a year company has implemented it in one way or another. Business improvement when carried out correctly with the whole of your workforce can work perfectly, when it is carried out incorrectly through a select few staff members and all the rest of the staff are left out, this causes friction and will fail.