Achieving operational excellence through employee engagement and cultural change

Operational excellence (OPEX) will be high on the agenda for organizations of all types in 2024. OPEX offers diverse business benefits ranging from process efficiency and competitive advantage to compliance and data driven decision making. Generative AI, supply chain management and sustainability are among several trends expected to play key a role in shaping the OPEX landscape this year.

However, whatever drives businesses to achieve OPEX, employee engagement and cultural change are integral to success, each providing both areas of opportunity and challenge.

PEX Network spoke to Nabil Mohamed, chief technology officer (CTO) of 4Sale, Kuwait’s largest online buying, selling and renting platform, about achieving OPEX through employee engagement and cultural change in the technology industry.

PEX Network: What role does employee engagement play in achieving OPEX?

Nabil Mohamed: You cannot achieve OPEX without fully educating and engaging your team on the company’s mission and why it’s important. Unlike in traditional industries, where it's possible to follow established best practices of operational excellence, in the technology industry you need to create your own operational metrics and set your own standards for velocity and quality. This requires a great deal of critical thinking and end-to-end coverage of use cases.

A CEO can not do this alone. Instead, to achieve this, the company’s employees must appreciate the need for growth and consumer delight and decide upon common operational principles that can be optimized to produce this. Ultimately, if your team is engaged, they’ll use their analytical skills and broad knowledge to understand exactly what needs to be done to get to the next level, and the operational principles implemented will be smart, original and 100 percent appropriate.

READ: 5 operational excellence trends for 2024

PEX Network: How important is cultural change in OPEX?

NM: Having the right culture when pursuing OPEX is everything. To achieve OPEX, shift from relying on metrics and targets. Invest time in explicitly vocalizing and overcommunicating the company’s values, direction and decision-making processes. Only when team members have a common understanding and appreciation for how the business ticks and its culture do you start to see people managing for the intended customer behavior, instead of managing for the metric.

PEX Network: What are the biggest challenges businesses can face in relation to employee engagement and cultural change?

NM: One of the biggest challenges faced when trying to bring about cultural change and raise employee engagement is employees feeling disconnected from what the company wants to achieve and/or how management decisions are made.

A significant obstacle to employee engagement is the excessive dependence on remote work, to the point where teams lack crucial opportunities to gather in the same room, share meals, cultivate relationships, draw energy from each other and ultimately collaborate effectively. The solution to this is to mandate a minimum amount of time for employees to be in the office. Although it may feel uncomfortable initially, when executed effectively, employees at the company will embrace spending time in the office, leading to significant benefits for the business.

READ: PEX Guide: What is operational excellence?

PEX Network: How can businesses foster a culture of OPEX to stay ahead?

NM: First, debate, set, write down and overcommunicate the specific set of values upon which your company gets things done, makes decisions, prepares for work and builds trust. Second, be crystal clear on not only the metrics you’re trying to improve but also on the qualitative goal/s these metrics are designed to achieve. Third, recognize and applaud gradual advancements, valuing not only major transformations. The former tend to be more enduring, establishing a deeper impact than the latter and are occasionally more challenging to implement.

PEX Network: What role will employee engagement and cultural change play in OPEX strategies of the future?

NM: As technology becomes more global, new challenges emerge on the employee engagement and cultural change frontiers. More and more, employers must keep pace with an ever-strengthening global outlook. This means learning to align employees from different backgrounds, cultures and geographies on what needs to get done and how best to do it.

Having high-caliber managers stationed at every sensitive juncture where there’s risk of disconnect is crucial and hence, in the years to come, we should expect a growing reliance on managers to drive home the tenets behind OPEX.

Given the above, context-switching will likely become even more crucial to achieving OPEX. This principle dictates that you cannot simply set a host of numerical targets that are agnostic to geography and culture. Targets need to be shaped and debated by the right people so that they are set in a way that’s applicable and realistic on the ground, whilst also honoring the basic goals of the company. This is why I cannot place high enough value on managers having a deep knowledge of the environment they operate in.

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