Strategies for Continuous Improvement

¶ … Monitor Continuous Improvement In the situation with Company X, talking about continuous improvement is putting the cart way before the horse. The CEO has determined that the company lacks consistent process of any sort, and explained that employees will need to envision their jobs differently. This is reasonable -- a culture change to a culture focused on continuous improvement is a mandatory precondition for actually pursuing continuous improvement (Clark, Silvester and Knowles, 2013).

Those are major issues that will need to be remedied just to lay the groundwork for any sort of continuous improvement. Having a consistent set of best practices for each task is a prerequisite for continuous improvement, so talking about CI without that is premature to say the least. Forget decision-making, what needs to happen is that the top performers will need to be brought together to set up best practices for each critical task within the organisation. The tasks need to be broken down first.

Then management must determine which of those tasks are suited for standardization and which are best suited to be tailored to each employee's individual skill sets. With so many people doing things their own way, the first step is to develop a standardized set of best practices, based on what history shows is the most successful way of performing that task.

This is where input from top performers comes in handy -- an HR professional knows that each job description and methodology is developed by interviewing the people who do those jobs, and do them well. Continuous improvement can start with standardized processes, but remember that standardization precludes deviation from prescribed tactics. You cannot tell people they must do something a certain way and then expect them to ad lib and find better ways. Continuous improvement therefore comes more from studying how people work, and engaging in problem-solving.

This ends up being more of a managerial task, but again input can also come from top performers, and the organisation may benefit from giving top performers more leeway than ordinary-level performers to test different methods for performance improvement.

Setting objectives and allowing the best people to figure out how to meet those objectives will result in the type of quantum performance improvements that the organisation seeks -- incremental improvement would look good for Company X today but without quantum technique or technology improvements, incremental success hits a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly. Communication of all techniques is critical. Initially, employees will need to be retrained, and then new techniques will also need to be introduced through formal training.

This is necessary because employees have had considerable leeway to structure their work before, and if the company wants to change employee views on how new skills are acquired, the company needs to adopt more formal training processes. Mentoring is a technique that will help the leaders identify and train the next generation of leaders. This is important because top performers will need mentoring in order to start conceptualizing their jobs better, which is an intellectual shift away from simply following best practices.

Mentorship from leaders can help with that shift in mindset, helping top people start to think more about how they can foster continuous improvements. The case does not outline any processes, so I cannot realistically talk about what processes will be improved. I don't work there and no virtually nothing about what they do.

Naming a process is not the same thing as actually outlining one -- you can't improve a process until you know what its constituent parts are, let alone its objectives, which were also not identified in the case. Knowledge Questions Q1) Benchmarking is when a benchmark is set, and performance is measured against that benchmark. This is used for continuous improvement by consistently increasing the benchmark so that the person is required to consistently improve performance (Reh, 2015).

A best practice is a way of doing things that has been demonstrated to be, in theory anyway, the best know way of doing something. If all employees follow best practices, those practices can be refined and improved in order to deliver continuous improvement. Change management is the process whereby organisational change is managed. There are many types of change, but the basic principle is that managers need to guide the change process so that change objectives are achieved, and obstacles to change are overcome.

Change management techniques can be used to change behaviors towards better setting up continuous improvement, such as in the Company X case. Continuous improvement systems and processes are those systems and process that promote continuous improvement. They can be used for continuous improvement by definition. A continuous improvement system should regularly examine the processes by which work is done and seek to find ways to improve them. Quality systems are system by which quality is monitored and controlled.

These systems are essential to continuous improvement because they measure organisation outcomes -- you need measurement to know whether the organisation is genuinely improving, and to identify the tactics and techniques that contribute to improvement. Q2) There are many environmentally less-destructive work practices. First, not using paper is a starting point. Many work processes are done electronically.