Getting positive employee engagement to support a change transformation is a common challenge faced by many organisations, particularly if you are looking to increase efficiency, or reduce costs for example. If one of your main objectives is to change and improve your business processes, making sure that your employees are engaged enough to propose improvement opportunities is crucial to the ongoing success of the project.
There are two ways to implement change in your organisation. You could go for a ‘big bang’ effect, where any changes are made simultaneously; however, this tends to cause more friction, and there’s every possibility that your organisation will struggle to return to business as usual as this will be a real shock to the system.
We believe the best way to make changes and ensure that they continue to be successful over time, is to implement a continuous improvement initiative. This is the quickest way to return to business as usual. If employees are invested in an improvement project, they will be less likely to resist change, and this is ultimately what will help to drive continuous improvement in your organisation.
For any process improvement project to be successful, businesses’ must ensure that there is a cultural change to support its implementation not only for the duration of the project, but also for the longevity of the organisation. You can find out how to create a culture of continuous improvement by reading this article:
Continuous Improvement: How do I create a culture of Continuous Improvement?
How can employee engagement drive continuous improvement?
If your employees are engaged with your project from the very start, it is more likely that they will be less resistant to change as they have been directly involved in making improvements to the organisation. This will ultimately lead to a greater sense of ownership and responsibility within their roles.
Employees can help to drive continuous improvement as they perform their processes regularly so they are more aware of where the inefficiencies or bottlenecks lie. It is also likely that if they have identified a part of their process that isn’t working well, they will already have taken the steps to improve it. This is invaluable for continuous improvement as changes are made incrementally over time.
If your employees are driving your improvement initiative, then it is much more likely that it will be successful as they will have the best idea of what needs to be changed to ensure that their processes are as efficient as possible. However businesses’ must be aware that any changes made to existing processes need to survive past that initial change transformation, and you can learn more about this here:
Getting New Business Processes to Survive Past Your Change Initiative: The Approach for Success
What are the best ways to improve employee engagement?
Employee engagement can be improved by making sure that members of staff are made aware of the project and are involved from the very start. If your main objective is to improve your business processes, then process mapping is an essential activity to undertake.
To learn more about process mapping and how you can get your whole team involved, read our article:
5 Business Process Mapping Tips for Getting Your Entire Team Involved
The ongoing success of a process mapping project will rely heavily on keeping the level of engagement high throughout its implementation. This will also directly influence the success of your continuous improvement initiative so businesses must ensure that any new system or change to the current way of doing things is properly communicated across the whole organisation.
How to get your employees to propose improvement opportunities
If you are struggling to get your employees to engage fully with changing and improving their processes, you may need to consider how they are accessing the information they need. It is not enough to just say that a process has changed and not document those changes as it is likely that those changes will be forgotten or ignored.
Employees are much more likely to engage with improvement projects if they are able to see the impact that their changes are having on their processes, in their departments or even in the organisation as a whole.
At Triaster, we believe the best way to ensure that business processes are kept up-to-date is to store and manage them in a Process Library.
A Process Library is an easy-to-use, secure website that intelligently houses an organisation’s processes, policies, procedures and documentation. You can read more about sharing your processes using a Process Library here:
How to share your process maps in an interactive and engaging way
If you would like to learn more about how you can adopt a straightforward approach to continual improvement, download the Problems We Solve e-book that contains 7 real business case studies of businesses and how they are harnessing continual improvement:
Related articles:
Continuous Improvement: How do I create a culture of Continuous Improvement?
Getting New Business Processes to Survive Past Your Change Initiative: The Approach for Success
5 Business Process Mapping Tips for Getting Your Entire Team Involved
How to share your process maps in an interactive and engaging way