One of the biggest bumbles in business is the way so many managers overlook the value of small improvements from frontline employees. It’s not that they don’t care—it’s just that the impact doesn’t seem big enough to matter. But here’s a reality check.

An administrative assistant at a private-duty in-home care company – a former client – came up with a simple way to reduce errors in a paperwork process with a more structured review format. She presented it during one of their routine team improvement huddles we implemented. It cut down on rework, saving about 15 minutes per review. With 20 reviews a week, that’s 5 hours saved—every week. At $22/hour for the admin person, the company saved $5,720 annually.

That one improvement by itself didn’t make a huge difference. But multiply that kind of thinking across the entire organization, and look what they got from it. At the end of the first year of using our processes for systematic continuous improvement (SCI), they saw a 14% boost in revenue and a 39% jump in profit, all generated from nearly 300 employee-generated improvements.

Here’s what the president of the company had to say about the CI huddles in the early days of our work with their team: “Nothing ever goes fast enough for me. But if you had told me we would make the kind of improvements in our team and the way we do things in just six weeks, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Curious to see how small gains from hidden brains can deliver big results for your company?

Schedule a free 30-minute call and find out.