Are you listening to the “silent geniuses” in your business?

Imagine the scene: you’ve come up with a revolutionary idea, one that you know is going to have a significant impact and deliver great benefits within your business. The only problem is no one is listening. Worse still, there isn’t even a way of getting your idea in front of people. It’s a frustrating situation and you’re probably not going to feel too pleased or motivated about your idea disappearing into the ether. What if we told you that this could very well be happening in your own business??

The people that perform tasks and activities day-in, day-out are the ones that feel the most pain of inefficient or ineffective ways of working. They know better than anyone what causes delays, rework, unnecessary workarounds, poor client service, and the subsequent frustration that they cause. At Map Your Process, we call them the silent geniuses. Despite the knowledge and solutions these silent geniuses possess, in many businesses there can be a distinct lack of truly engaging with such employees to ensure their ideas are heard. The question of “how do we do things better?” tends to be aimed at managers, who can often see things at a more macro level rather than focusing on the pain that is being felt by their team.?

What Do We Mean by “Truly Engaging”???

Let’s pause a moment to consider what we mean by “truly engaging”. This is an area where it is very easy to pay lip service to the idea of involving staff in process improvement initiatives, but in reality not follow through with it. There are pitfalls if the right approach is not adopted, with the likely outcome that rather than feeling more engaged, your employees might feel even more distanced from the process and demotivated. For people to feel truly engaged, they need to know that the initiative is taken seriously from the top down, that their ideas raised will be reviewed and acted on, and that success will be recognised. That’s a simplified view, but if those three things are not in place, the initiative will struggle to get off the ground.?

Here’s our short take on some of the key strategies that you might employ to engage your team in process improvement:??

Ensure Participation?

If employees don’t raise their ideas, then the whole idea of involving them in process improvement is over before it has started. Encouraging staff to come up with ideas is, at face value, the easy bit, but is “encouragement” enough? Why not make it a requirement in their annual objectives to come up with at least one process improvement idea? In an organisation of 50 people, that quickly results in a lot of ideas!??

Provide Feedback?

If people are going to take the time to raise ideas, then it is important to show that their contribution is valued by providing feedback on every idea raised. If the idea isn’t valid or not possible then the person who raised it should understand why. If they don’t get any feedback and feel that their idea was ignored, the whole idea of process improvement is quickly undermined. If they understand why their idea was not viable, then they can learn from that and suggest further suggestions accordingly.?

Implement the Viable Ideas?

This might sound obvious, but viable ideas need to be implemented. It’s closely connected to the previous point but potentially worse. A member of the team has taken the time to come up with a better way of working, been told it is a great idea by the business, and then…nothing. This lack of action can undermine the initiative and morale if an agreed improvement isn’t implemented.?

There will always be competing projects and other critical work to be done, but even seeing the idea on an implementation roadmap helps to show that the ideas are being taken seriously (as long as they don’t sit on the roadmap forever!).?

Incentivise Good Ideas?

Providing some sort of award for the best ideas is a great way of gaining attention and participation for the initiative. It can be anything from an extra day's holiday to a gift voucher, but we would strongly recommend that there needs to be something. Maybe a quarterly award for the best idea raised in the previous three months and an annual award for the best idea of the year. It’s probably worth basing the award on when the idea was accepted rather than implemented as there could be internal delays outside of the instigators control.??

Celebrate Success?

When ideas turn into changes which deliver results, ensure they are positively publicised on both an individual and team level. A simple version of a Six Sigma storyboard is a great way of showing how an issue was resolved and the benefits achieved. At a team or company level, it is worth highlighting what the initiative has delivered as a whole (e.g. cost savings, time savings).??

Make sure that these are visible to all by displaying them around the office, making them part of regular staff communications or even putting them on the intranet.?

Ensure There is a Process!?

We were always going to mention a process at some point! Make sure there is a clear method for employees to submit their ideas. Your business needs to avoid a situation where some ideas are being submitted via email, others on mapping software, the remainder on bits of paper. This is where ideas may get lost and you will, inadvertently, run into many of the issues mentioned previously. Ensure the process clearly sets expectations for the person submitting the idea in terms of what happens next and timescales.?

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Engaging team members to drive process improvement is an area that we at Map Your Process feel very strongly about. We are convinced that there is an untapped goldmine in many businesses that can deliver huge benefits if employees are engaged in the right way.?

When working with our clients on this type of work, we use process management software that allows users to raise ideas against the actual process. This allows the ideas to be seen in context which can often lead to other team members contributing towards an idea to make it even more powerful. Capturing the ideas in this way also us it to see where most ideas are coming from and where more focus may be needed. The assumption is that people will, certainly initially, raise ideas around their role. A good sign of success is not just from the results delivered but when ideas are raised on how other teams work.??

Ultimately, the way you implement a process improvement initiative doesn’t need to be complex. Make it work for your business and both your organisation and your employees will reap the rewards.?