Continuous improvement a must

There are several ways to satisfying the customers' needs. One way to get better is by continuous improvement and objective management of customer expectations. Proactive organizations usually capitalize on both management and employee involvement to achieve significant results in overall business improvements. An example of a proactive organization is the Toyota Corporation. This automobile giant relies on a bottom-up flow of information and ideas that leads to continuous improvement. This allows for proper involvement of each work team in the identification and selection of waste for elimination. In Toyota, projects are selected by those who work in the teams and every member of a team work together to remove such waste by carefully looking at the processes. The resulting achievements of the Toyota Production System points to the fact that top management cannot just enforce change without carrying those that must change along. It is the employees that would work with the change; they are the ones that can jettison the efforts directed towards any change especially when they don't believe in it. This does not mean that only the employees hold all it takes to make the change successful. Excellent communication of ideas and information from the employees in Toyota is something to be envied; organizations that rely only on top to bottom flow of ideas may end up not carrying the users of the information along. This makes employee think that they are not responsible for the success of change initiatives. Can management achieve change without the employees who are the end users? No! Employees are very important for change that would affect them, just like the management support for such changes cannot be overemphasized.

 

 

Management should not just impose their ideas

One reason why management imposes ideas on their employees is just to ensure that the business aligns to the strategic plan of the organization. A question that regularly seeks to be answered, and in the mind of employees directs its queries to know why management should not care about the observations of the people who use the ideas, information and policies in the organization. Management cannot make change initiatives work through employee coercion. This is something that management should be aware of. Top executives should not just sit down in their cozy offices after attending a high level meeting to dish out instructions. An attempt should be made to be part of what is been endured by the lower cadre employees. The operation staffs of an international financial organization once complained that management had disrupted business severally with change initiations that are not properly coordinated. This is because no questions were asked, nor clarifications made before such changes were implemented. The effect of such change usually results in employee and customer dissatisfaction. Customers do not want change ideas that had not changed the employees working them. Therefore, the focus of every initiated change in any proactive organization is to get buy-in from the associates or employees who will use them to satisfy the customers. Management involvement is also significant in the sense that it assures the end users to whom the change is directed are they are assured that there is a high level support for the anticipated change coming from companywide involvement.

 

 

The essentials for change initiation

There is no doubt that change is the only thing that must take place in a proactive organization. Companies that don't get positioned for changes usually wakes up to find themselves far behind. This happened in the case of Polaroid, Enron and many others. Making examples of corporations that lost what they once had is not enough, but there is need to learn from them. Training employees to understand the tools of continuous improvement is very important. The stakeholders of change in an organization must understand and know how to use the tools of continuous improvement. By this they can conveniently identify and eliminate non-value adding parts of their activities and processes. When employees know why they are doing what they are asked to do and are part of the initiators, they tend to act supportively in ensuring that the change is upheld. Another thing that must be watched is the roll-out of change without proper check whether it aligns with the overall strategy of the organization. When changes are approved, there should be proper consideration for allowing it to work; otherwise it would mean another waste of resource that had to be called off in a short while. Careful consideration of effects of changes on all the stakeholders of the business before its official launch is very important and helps to get a positive triple bottom line effect i.e. people, planet and profit (Elkington, 1995).