By making your business more efficient, how much could you add to your bottom line?
With a modest 5% improvement per month, you could increase your productivity by 80% in one year… And by 220% by the end of year 2. What would that look like?
That’s all very exciting; now how do you motivate the team to take on the new ways of working.
One key component of a successful implementation of systems into the business is to ‘not frighten the staff’. To you it may seem an obvious advantage to improve the way the business is run; often, to team members, it raises all sorts of questions. These can have a detrimental impact on team morale. They could worry that they are just not very good at what they do, or that you think they’re not very good. It could raise concern that you are looking to replace them with systems and technology.
If you have a great team, you can use systems to help them be even better. The main thing is to communicate clearly the aims of the improvement program and how it will help them and the business be more productive.
If you introduce an improvement program, it needs to become part of the culture of the company… It’s just what we do around here!
Typically the biggest effort is implementing the idea of change. Once the team are onboard, the tasks are not that hard.
A good book to help the team understand why change is needed, is ‘who moved my cheese’ by Brian Tracey. Get everyone a copy – it’s very good value.
The biggest improvement program I was involved in was the introduction of ISO 9001 into a large manufacturing business. I was responsible for the implementation of the Quality Management System. It was certainly harder to educate and inspire the teams to take on the changes.
So, when looking to develop and implement a change program into your company, make sure you have your team with you – they will often end up pushing the project forward quicker than you imagined, when they can clearly see the benefits.
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