Following on from the 
previous post, “Is Employee Engagement just a good thing” and as much use as a one-handed clap, let’s see how to boost profit and pay by using the ‘other hand’.
We can all agree that employee engagement is a measure of people’s involvement in their work and their employer’s goals. That’s all good, of course, but how does that make a difference to the employer? What do these engaged employees do differently? Smile more? Come to work on time?
When your people are involved with the employer’s goals, why not ask them to improve the process? They are the process experts, in fact, because they operate the process 37 hours a week.
Don’t expect them to revolutionise the process but rather to incrementally evolve slightly better ways day after day. It amazed me that when I tried to start this, everybody said, “it’s not my/their job!” The bigger resistance coming from the support staff who saw it as their job alone.
When an operator improves the process they use day after day, and somebody says thank you, they feel valued.
I have seen lots of attempts at Continuous Improvement where a manager calls in the operators and tells them to go improve a process. Do you see the subtle difference between the manager-directed and self-directed improvement activity? The results from the manager-directed improvement are poor when compared to the alternative.
The vastly superior improvement process is the manager giving the operators permission to experiment and innovate. Yes, there have to be inviolate processes and rules, but really as few as possible. If you do this properly, and you may need help with this, there will be a groundswell of micro-improvements which in a few weeks will start to show in the operating results. But you must do it properly.
As you start to purge the processes of unnecessary waffle, the ‘adjacent possibles’ start to appear: the ideas for improvement that were impossible to see when obscured by what was there before.
Think how the employee feels when their improvement works and makes a difference. Think how that person feels when thanked. They feel valued and their engagement increases.
This is the ‘two-handed clap’. Employee Engagement and Continuous Improvement working together, delivering higher productivity through process simplification, reducing costs, meeting Customer needs and monthly invoicing.
Who would like to double their operating profit?