“Excellent firms don't believe in excellence – only in constant improvement.”
- Tom Peters

Okay, let’s talk dollars and “sense.” One reason that companies don’t get employees engaged in routine improvement processes is their obsession with the most precious commodity in any business – TIME.

Most of them see “time off the line” as a waste rather than an investment. They get caught in the irrational trap that time spent by employees scanning the workplace for potential improvements is a drain on the bottom line that’s better spent on “putting out the product.”

So let’s do the math.

Someone on the team has an improvement idea that reduces the time to complete a work process by one hour per week. There are 3 people involved in the process at an average hourly wage of $30 per hour. Over the course of 1 year (50 weeks), the savings in time alone is $4,500.

“That’s great,” says any sensible manager. “Love it when people come to me with ideas like that, and my door is always open to them.”

But here’s the deal. People have work to do, and they know the manager is always looking at their output first and foremost. The likelihood that they are going to walk away from the job and into the manager’s office to share an idea is somewhere between slim and none.

If improvements from team members really matter, if they are truly valued, the best way to demonstrate that is with routine processes to engage them in Systematic Continuous Improvement. That way, it becomes an integral part of everyone’s job, not just a distraction from “doing the work.”

When you do that, you go from getting an occasional idea here and there to getting a steady stream of improvements continuously producing value that greatly exceeds the cost of “time off the job.”

If that makes good “dollars and sense” to you, click on the link below and learn how to get your team engaged in an improvement routine that produces a big boost to your bottom line.

Begin your improvement journey today!

Getting better at getting better.