What is your company’s approach to continuous improvement?
Too many companies assign the responsibility to specialized operational excellence teams, which strips responsibility from the frontline team members doing the work. Worse, having specialists improve work processes ensures team members never learn how to improve their work, limiting their engagement and potential.
Coaching the skills and challenging team members to improve their work processes gives them opportunities to thrive — and contribute to improved business performance. Moreover, when managers and supervisors enable team members to improve their work processes, they demonstrate their respect and commitment to team members’ development.
Abcam, a biotech company, recently took this approach to improvement at one of its facilities. A continuous improvement coordinator teamed up with a material handler to dramatically transform the site’s logistics.
Read the interactive case study to learn what they did and the dramatic results.
I agree. Working with other team members is a huge responsibility and knowing how to improve on work processes is an even bigger one. What happens when one team member doesn’t improve on their work process when the other team members have?