Empowering Employees: How to Encourage Staff to Contribute to Process Improvement Efforts
Process improvement efforts enable companies to streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve client satisfaction. However, these efforts are only as effective as the employees who contribute to them. Empowering employees to participate in process improvement initiatives can yield tremendous benefits, from increased engagement and motivation to improved problem-solving skills and greater innovation.
To create a collaborative, process-oriented team, managers first need to understand the potential roadblocks and the strategic steps they need to take.
Roadblocks to Employee Empowerment
Many businesses struggle to empower their employees effectively, often swinging between half-hearted workplace culture initiatives and unexpected, forced process changes. Change happens from the top, down. If the leaders of a business are not aware of the potential roadblocks they may face when attempting to empower their teams, they will end up getting nowhere with their initiatives.
Lack of Trust: When managers don’t show confidence in the employee’s abilities to contribute meaningfully to the company’s goals, employees will start to lose trust. Or if promises for improvements or changes were made in the past that were never actually implemented, employees won’t be as likely to want to contribute to a process change conversation.
Unclear Expectations: If employees aren’t quite sure what is being asked of them, they may prefer to stay silent rather than actively brainstorm and participate.
Inadequate Training: To effectively empower a team, employees need to have a baseline knowledge of what efficient processes look or feel like. Employees typically only spot inefficiencies when they get frustrated with a task in a process and fail to recognize other red flags.
Fear of Change: Change is difficult for everyone, even early adopters. Your brain quickly forms habits, even at work, and your brain prefers the path of least resistance. Which means change often equals bad. Employees need to understand the why and how of a process change to be more likely to contribute to the improvement discussions and adopt the new process.
Strategies For Empowering Employees
Strengthen Your Culture
Your day to day culture is a foundational element of empowering your employees and it goes beyond Food Truck Tuesdays and happy hours. Start creating more trust in your team by spending more time communicating with employees, understanding their motivations, and showing them that you’re confident in their abilities to get things done.
It’s also important to encourage positivity when you’re communicating with your employees. Try kicking off your meetings with a Wins & Wonder or Success & Solutions framework. Employees can share positives (wins/successes) and discuss ways to overcome current challenges (wonders/solutions).
2. Set Clear Expectations and Goals
Clarity is an exhausted term that is not at all overrated. Clarity provides structure, direction, and accountability on a team. To start setting expectations and goals with clarity consider documenting your processes, implementing a task management system, and creating an Operations Hub. Ops Hubs are central locations for employees to find important information. Here you can link to SOP’s, provide important company info, and list out vision, mission, and goals.
3. Provide Training and Support
Employees should understand what an efficient process means and how to recognize the signs of an inefficient, broken process. Studies show that companies that embrace Lean and have dedicated employees implementing. Lean processes and standards boost profitability by an average of 10-15%.
4. Involve Them In The Decision Making
People always need to know “why” when a change comes along. Knowing the why is only part of the battle. Effective change management happens when you invite your employees into the tough discussions. When they get to voice their perspectives and be a part of the brainstorming process - knowing that they are being taken seriously - then they are much more likely to accept and adopt a change.
Consider 1:1 meetings or group feedback meetings where employees can openly voice frustratins, what’s not working, and discuss the impact of possible solutions.
Empowering employees is not an overnight project and requires trust, clarity, training, and involvement. By using these strategies to steer clear of the potential roadblocks, business leaders can unlock the full potential of their workforce and embrace continuous improvement as an element of their success.
If you’re ready to kick off a process improvement project or simply want to equip your team with the knowledge and training to improve processes themselves, then schedule a Possibilities Chat today. We’ll explore what may be the right approach for your unique team.