Including Continuous Improvement In Your Company Culture
So why would you want to develop a culture of continuous improvement in your organization? And how can you use custom learning experiences to drive that kind of culture? In this article, we’ll talk about how continuous improvement is ultimately tied to learning—and how a great learning platform and approach can help develop and support those goals.
How To Include Continuous Improvement In Your Company Culture
Excellence is a continuous process and not an accident.
– A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Little And Often
Big changes can often feel scary and insurmountable to both organizations and the people within them. Enacting large change programmes takes a lot of time, potentially involves having project teams ramped up and cross-organizational comms and engagement to get everyone on board. Tackling changes a little at a time, making smaller steps towards a larger goal, often feels more appealing and eliminates some of the bureaucracy around.
Taking One From The Team
Continuous improvement cultures tend to generate engagement as standard due to their nature—they rely greatly on employees to identify opportunities for improvement. This bottom-up approach can prove particularly effective because employees are closest to the business problems you need to solve.
Empowering Your Teams
Asking employees to come up with ideas for improving the organisation might yield some great results—but more likely than not, tasking them with improving your product line or making more margin is too broad a remit. Instead, ask them to suggest changes that would positively impact processes or save them 10 minutes a day. Then, give them the power to make those changes—and to roll them out to others within the organization where relevant. If you have five people suggesting a change that saves them 10 minutes a day, and they each roll it out to 20 colleagues—suddenly, you’re saving a lot of time and employees feel heard and empowered to make positive change where they can see the impact on themselves and colleagues.
Invest Small, Reap Big
Generally, ideas that come from employees in a continuous improvement culture are fairly inexpensive. In fact, they generally involve removing steps in a process, such as meetings, duplications of effort, or outdated activities that reduce wasted time, cost, and energy. And when you calculate the value of these improvement ideas in resource cost and outcomes, they often create fairly incredible ROI.
Taking It To Scale
You can’t just make small changes and call them an improvement, you also need to measure the impact and, if it’s positive, then apply it to other problem areas. That’s why they start small, grow big nature of continuous improvement can quickly snowball into something that’s bigger than the sum of its’ parts.
Creating A Culture With Learning
L&D teams can foster a culture of continuous improvement through creating a culture of learning, enabled by technology that supports personalized learning-driven not only by the organization but also by the user.
Why Is Continuous Improvement Important?
Continuous improvement gives organizations a framework in which to work towards reaching the next level of excellence, and helps your organizations’ employees feel more connected, valued, and engaged in the process. What’s not to love?
Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
– Vince Lombardi
It Boosts Employee Engagement
The whole idea behind continuous improvement is engaging individuals in creating improvements that identify customer needs, current problems and finding solutions that minimize wasted effort and frustration—not just for the customer, but for the individuals within the organization too.
Continuous improvement gives organizations a framework for reaching the next level of excellence, and challenges employees to go beyond existing competencies and try something new. That challenge and investment in an employees’ skills and knowledge ultimately create engagement.
It Reduces Turnover Rates
Continuous improvement is designed to empower employees to address problems that cause them frustration, which increases engagement. And we know that more engaged employees are more likely to stay with an organization, meaning you can retain talent and reduce cost in recruiting and training new teams.
It Creates A Proactive Learning Culture
If you continue to work and learn in the same way as you did five years ago, you’d quickly fall behind competitors. The marketplace itself is continually shifting, and so is the way we use technology, engage with the workplace and our organizations themselves. Just look at the impact of COVID-19 on the way the modern workplace functions to see that shifts both big and small are continually occurring. A continuous improvement culture challenges employees and leaders to move out of their comfort zones and continually seek new and more effective ways of doing their jobs—which drives a need for continuous learning. And so the circle continues!
The idea behind continuous improvement sits at the heart of almost every business improvement model. Download the eBook How Custom Learning Experiences Help Build A Continuous Improvement Culture and get to discover how a great approach and custom learning experiences can help develop and support those goals.
