Imagine if you could change your team’s mindset.
If you could create a work culture that proactively seek to solve problems, continuously, small steps at a time.
What would happen?
This mindset would mean your company could faster improve efficiency, reduce costs, and get happier employees while at it.
Here are 4 steps:
1. Seek continuous improvement: Step by step
Continuous improvement isn’t about setting a high pace.
It’s about finding a rhythm that works for your organization, it’s about changing everyone’s mindset to a systematic way of finding better ways to do things. To find out how to work better as a team.
What we hear from our users is that over-explaining the Why helps. As does showing that employees are important and that their thoughts, ideas and questions all matter.
How do they best show this? By taking action to fix the stuff their employees think needs fixing at work. Measure, talk, improve. Repeat.
Everything will be more fun if you get your team to take a greater interest in the group’s results and achievements, instead of just the individual members’ goals.
Employ the KISS principle. Keep It Simple Stupid! Forget the 80-pages super-plan that no one is going to read.
Improve your workplace step by step, build trust, and adjust as you go along.
2. Open and ongoing dialogue
Our best leaders share progress and result with everyone. They embrace a transparent attitude at work. They encourage everyone to make their voice heard and chip in.
Sometimes the loudest voices aren’t the ones that need to be heard the most.
Neutral data helps to deal with employees who feel that “everything sucks“. Our users do their best to find formats where everyone feels confident to share.
It could be an informal chat with the first colleague you meet in the corridor, all-hands meetings, group meetings… Our data that show that companies that use face-to-face interactions are the ones that improve their employee morale the fastest.
An ongoing dialogue where everyone shares their finding will help your team to learn from others mistakes and wins. This way you can improve your effectiveness and productivity to meet both internal and external needs.
Don’t fear conflict, not speaking up can result in more conflicts later on.
Just address it in the open.
Related: examples of companies that use continuous improvement
3. A great workplace is everyone’s job
Do you have a company culture where people have more ‘green’ days or ‘red’ days?
You as an employer have the obligation to provide the conditions for people to thrive at work, but let’s face it, you can only take it so far: Motivation also has to come from within, you can’t force people to be motivated at work.
People need to want to be held accountable. We are driven by intrinsic motivators, not the stick and the carrot.
Great teams and leaders make sure that everyone in the group is held accountable to their commitments – no one wants to let down a coworker.
What would happen if you paved the way for people to find their voice within the organization? If you could get themselves to start defining both problems and solutions at work to continuously improve?
Well, it would probably give them a sense of ownership, which would lead to a higher level of achieved business objectives.
How can employees be involved in continuous improvement? We love it when we see leaders that give up some of their control and empower their employees!
4. Understand what motivates your employees
Best-selling author Daniel Pink lists the three elements of true motivation.
Performance increases dramatically when these three elements are present and promoted:
- Autonomy, or the desire to be self-directed, assuming we are built with inner drive;
- Mastery, we want to get better at things that are important to us; and
- Purpose, people who find purpose at work unlock the highest level of the motivation game. We get more motivated by connecting to a cause that’s larger or more meaningful beyond ourselves. This is when money isn’t an issue any longer (e.g. provided your team gets a decent paycheck, that they have “enough”). Motivated staff will dramatically smooth the process of continuous improvements.
What would you improve to make your workplace better?
Would your team pick the same?
Continuous workplace improvement
Being better than we were yesterday is a nice goal for an organization.
So how can you know if your team is really going in the right direction? Is real progress being made? Are your initiatives working?
If you start heading in a downward spiral, what mechanisms do you have to detect the trend in time so you can quickly take action and get the plan back on track?
You can’t start changing things without knowing if the actions you take have an impact or not.
You need analytics.
Related: Continuous improvements examples: enhancing productivity in the workplace
An ongoing People KPI means you can monitor employee morale trends at work while testing new things to see how your employees react.
With a mindset of continuous workplace improvement, you can improve your company’s bottom line while getting a company culture with more ‘green’ days at work, and find new ways to improve team building.
So when is the best time to start with continuous improvement at work?
Well, just go for it.
Wondering how to measure continuous improvement in an easy way? Try our Celpax device.
Promote continuous improvement and start measuring if you’re improving employee morale! Get 1 Celpax device and start building a positive work culture today.
Hej! I’m Rebecca. HR analytics enthusiast and co-owner at Celpax, a for-profit helping workplaces promote continuous improvement at work. What would you improve to make your workplace better? Let’s share some continuous improvements examples on Twitter!