¶ … 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...
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…
Improvement What is the relationship between continuous learning, improvement, and adaptation? Why is understanding this relationship important to those leading systemic change? How might understanding this relationship assist leaders in determining whether the organizational structure will promote and support a given change initiative? Explain. Continuous improvement is considered vital for an organization in attaining flexibility, receptiveness and the capacity to adapt fast to changes within the environment. This facilitates enhancement of the
Total Quality Management Continuous Improvement, properly applied, render BPR (Business Process Reengineering) unnecessary.' Discuss. Total Quality Management and Continuous Improvement, when properly applied, render Business Process Reengineering unnecessary The internationalized economic crisis constituted the number one challenge for economic agents across the world, who suddenly found themselves faced with resource constraints, decreasing purchasing power of customers as well as other somber predicaments. While the topic of the crisis is extremely complex
Improvement Innovation and Continuous Improvement Bounce Fitness has a number of locations across Australia. Although the company has a long history of operations, very little has changed in the company's operating procedures. One of the most salient problems that have been identified is scheduling customers' initial consultations and keeping records up-to-date. These issues need to be address in a timely manner so that the organization can improve its service offerings. Monitoring and
Initially, the Home Depot strove to turn its flagging profits and image around through product innovation, although it has never been as rigorous in its self-examination as Toyota. Still, after expanding to the point that industry analysts worried that it had overextended itself, and after the more female-friendly Lowes stores with their superior store layout threatened its dominance, the Home Depot "sanded down its rougher product edges a little to
The primary reason for their achievements lays in the creativity and innovation brought in by CEO Howard Schultz, but also by the appropriate understanding and integration of theoretical managerial concepts. Two of the most relevant such concepts are the strategy development and the organization learning. The two concepts are interconnected and both rely massively on the firm's ability to analyze the internal and external environments and best adapt to
HRM A Strategy to Manage Human Capital in a MNE Multinational enterprises may face many challenges, one important issue is the way in which human capital is managed and leveraged in order to create value. Most large organizations will have a variety in their employee base in terms of cultural background, native languages, religion and educational backgrounds. As the firm expand internationally the variety of employee differences is likely to increase. Most