Scheduling Continuous Improvement into Day to Day Operations
Continuous improvement shouldn’t be a special part of management. It’s fundamental to keep any business in business. Scheduling it just makes it that much easier.
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Plug Continuous Improvement Right Into Your Work Day
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Continuous Improvement has been largely embraced as a solution to problems of:
1) Profitability
2) Productivity
3) Employee Morale
4) Environment and Working Conditions
Here’s why.
1) Profitability – Working to continually analyze procedures lets managers roll back overhead costs and improve efficiency.
2) Productivity – The competition is always going to be exploiting the latest and greatest to make sure they’re getting the most out of every customer, tool and method. These need to be maximized and shared widely.
3) Employee Morale – You really can’t underestimate the benefits – in terms of profitability and productivity – of happy employees. Discouraged and dejected employees are doubtless costing any company more than they’re worth.
4) Work Environment – Continuous improvement very often shows up most obviously in terms of immediate environmental factors. Changes should be noted and, where possible, the story of each improvement will work to benefit your bottom line.
Instilling a culture of continuous improvements is also one of the chief concerns of business managers, almost everywhere.
Acknowledgement
Acknowledging and recognizing the problem is a huge step. Convincing principles that the value is there can be a huge obstacle. But don’t give up too soon. Though the larger organization will nearly always benefit from recognizing and confronting the problem, solutions can also be addressed at the departmental or sub-level.
Whatever level you’re looking at, leadership is the number one prerequisite. And although resistance to change is nearly omnipresent in any kind of organization, Continuous Improvement is, in some sense, the answer to that resistance.
Ximble is designed to provide ease of use in implementing gradual or step-by-step improvement or a totally drastic, now or never, do-or-die kind of solution. Which you choose is totally up to you.
Plugging your Continuous Improvement in should look a little like this with regard to each of the above-mentioned areas:
1) Profitability
All of the below is ultimately about profitability. The more and better improvements you make, the more information you’ll have to continuously improve the bottom line, too.
2) Productivity
Happier, freer and “more adult” employees are always more productive. In terms of plugging it in officially, we’ve seen employees using calendar and scheduling software to continually update management on conditions and specifications of shifts, hours, workload and, yes, improvements.
3) Employee Morale
Allowing employees more freedom and more work-life balance is a terrific way to open things up and get better results. You’re also allowing them to provide more and more feedback as to what is working and what is not. At the end of the day, that’s what really matters.
4) Environment and Working Conditions
Continuous Improvements depend on process centered thinking. For that you need processes in place and you need to know to continually improve, correct, and overcome execution difficulties.
Again, as mentioned above, employing or implementing a calendar system allows you to vastly improve morale:
a) By implementing a continuous, regular and ongoing two-way communications system.
b) It works by email, but you can ramp it up with text or the internet for really good, ongoing communications.
c) You’re also including far more of your employees in the process. That makes them happier and your organization smarter.
d) Identifying and executing new ideas, process and methods is a lot easier when you have a highly productive team already plugged into a process of ongoing, continuous improvements.
We work regularly to get more Continuous Improvement ideas plugged into a regular schedule. The chief way to get started is to encourage ongoing, regular contact and a good exchange of ideas with no penalties for criticism or whistle-blowing.
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