For businesses today, the requirement to be able to change is integral. Continuous Improvement (CI) can be a means of ensuring your organisation is keeping up-to-date with the world around them. Although the challenges are numerous, CI can be successful if organisations consider the following 4 recommendations:
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Many organisations embarking on an enterprise-wide transformation to agile working, struggle to sustain or scale the benefits they initially achieve. The journey towards agility is a marathon, not a sprint, and it requires continued commitment, at all levels of the organisation, to ensure agile ways of working stick.
The first six to 12 months of introducing agile throughout an organisation will result in visible improvements in speed to market, productivity, efficiency and employee engagement.
How often do you think about your employees in respects to the experience they have from the beginning to the end of their employment with your organisation, from the moment they hear about your company to the time they walk away? We're launching a series of blogs that focus on the elements within the employee lifecycle and as we've covered a lot about attraction in the past, we're moving on to onboarding.
To remain competitive in the modern era, staying still and simply functioning is practically prehistoric. Businesses must be efficient and ahead of the curve, which can be done in a number of ways, one of which is through implementing a culture of Continuous Improvement (CI). Firms are competitive, not by their product/service, location or process, but by what it knows about how it behaves in various situations and understanding how to improve the efficiency of this behaviour. CI provides this knowledge and allows an organisation to constantly act on this knowledge.
Large corporates are, at best, 30% efficient in delivering change. From launching a loan product to landing a new bakery range on a supermarket shelf, big organisations are failing to deliver change at pace and realise value from it.
One leading credit card provider told us they’d last delivered a major new product eight years ago. ‘We were the leader in the market,' said the project manager. 'However, others have caught up and now we’re struggling to respond.’
'It takes us two years to do what our competitors can do in two months.' MD - FTSE100 organisation
I have previously written about personal productivity pointing out that not everything on the ‘to-do list’ has equal impact. I also wrote about planning using your energy levels and briefly touched upon the concept of ‘deep work’.
I think that most people know about these concepts but if knowledge was the only thing we needed, the advice on the internet would have made us all billionaires!
If you google ‘productivity tips’, chances are you will get lots of tactical advice, hints and tips that can help you cram more into the day.
‘Tidy your desk, work fewer hours, ignore your phone or even take a nap at work.’
My personal favourite is ‘get up early’. Bill Gates gets up at 0400 and he’s a billionaire. Therefore you should also get up at 0400 if you want to be a billionaire. It’s absolute nonsense. There is no correlation between how early you get up and how successful you will be.
The UK workforce is relatively unproductive. France and Germany both have efficiency levels that are 30% higher than that of the UK. Only in October did productivity levels return to normal after an all-time low following the recent economic crisis.
Employee silence occurs when employees make conscious decisions to not provide information, opinions and feedback, raise issues or make suggestions. It can occur for a number of reasons, such as a belief that providing an idea or feedback is futile as it will be ignored, or a fear that expressing a view differing from that of colleagues or management risks professional relationships, job opportunities and security.