If you have ever home-canned fresh produce, such as fruits or vegetables, you know there is a step-by-step process you must carefully follow. The process is extremely important for safety and health reasons. Basically home-canners must know how to process food preservation using sterilizing temperatures and proper sealing methods.
How are your processes working for you? Do they ensure the safety and health of your employees, customers and community? Do they help reduce costs and improve on efficiencies so your business can enjoy continued growth and success?
Business growth is exciting and challenging. And most businesses hope to grow and expand. With that, they often need to re-evaluate their processes. The ones in place may work OK, but they can almost always be improved upon.
Some business processes are extremely important for safety and quality reasons; and other processes can highly impact efficiencies, productivity, morale and ultimately the company’s bottom line. Therefore, process improvement can be leveraged as a valuable and powerful business strategy.
In fact, one of the best times a company can focus on process improvements is in a down economy. The reason being is process improvement keeps employees engaged during a time when their energy is drained due to the uncertainty of the marketplace. Also, growth is usually slowed down during such an economy, so there are fewer distractions for employees that would compete with a process improvement strategy.
In my work as a performance specialist, I help businesses improve their processes. This business management practice is referred to by various labels such as:
- Continuous improvement process, or what is also known as “Kaizen.”
- Continuous quality improvement process.
Kaizen refers to an ongoing approach based on a Japanese-developed philosophy, one where practitioners are always on the lookout to continually improve or upgrade processes. Simply put, the objective is to make things better. Kaizen is also known as “a mini Six Sigma.” (For additional information and resources about Kaizen, read more on Wikipedia.)
First, organizational leadership must commit to the process improvement challenge.
In order for a continuous process improvement strategy to successfully take root, however, leadership must be on board with it. You will know this when they take specific initiatives:
- Leadership must show evidence of striving to first understand such a strategy and its role.
- Leadership must demonstrate a strong desire to proactively pursue the strategy.
- Leadership must dedicate time and resources to the strategy.
Generally, process improvement entails a breakdown of a process and studying and analyzing all the steps. You will be looking at how you want things done versus the ways things are presently done. You want to close in on that gap. It’s important that leadership is on board, because process improvement can involve many, if not all, of the people within an organization.
Process improvement is a commitment. It’s one thing to want to improve an organization’s processes; it’s quite another to tear down all the steps of a process and build it back up again. If your business objectives are to grow, be productive and profitable, you will want to consider a process improvement strategy.
In a future HRTools.com Insight, I will continue describing how organizations can go about making a process improvement strategy work for them.