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The correlation between employee engagement and business outcomes has been very well established in numerous articles and case studies. Over the years, I’ve personally seen numerous cases where a joint focus on process improvement and employee engagement has driven outcomes that are well beyond the reach of traditional process improvement.
While we don’t often consider "soft" disciplines such as Organizational Development to be core to process excellence, I believe that it adds an extra dimension that, if cleverly combined with more traditional process excellence approaches (Lean, Six Sigma, etc.), would significantly increase business impact.
As an example, one might:
- Put greater emphasis on engaging more team members through collaborative problem solving activities;
- Push beyond a project-focused approach to improvements and start embedding problem solving techniques into daily continuous improvement coaching, tapping into the critical thinking of all team members;
- Build leadership capabilities to shift towards a "tight on outcomes but loose on approaches" leadership style to give team members more autonomy in creatively solving challenges;
- Increasing team member autonomy while creating tighter visibility on the end to end process;
- Focus on breaking down organizational boundaries through facilitated cross-functional improvement sessions, process orientations/"gemba walks" at all levels, aligning core process performance indicators and focused interventions to break organizational barriers.
These types of leadership approaches focus on organizational alignment against the process outcomes and result in increased end-to-end collaboration across the business.
In my experience, achieving this cross-silo collaboration is one of the most challenging obstacles in knowledge work processes.
Additionally, this approach pushes process improvement teams to take joint accountability for employee engagement outcomes, particularly as they pertain to questions around tools, work processes and questions around whether "my opinion counts".
What has been your experience in unleashing the passion and talents of your team members across an end-to-end process?