Ever wonder how to make your business even better? The secret lies in harnessing the power of continuous improvement.
Why create a hub for improvement Ideas?
Imagine having a dedicated space where your team can drop their genius suggestions for making your processes smoother and smarter. Well, you can! Here’s why it matters:
- Empower Your Team: Everyone has unique insights into daily operations. As a business owner, you aren’t the one who executes your processes on a day-to-day basis. Give your team a voice by creating a space for their brilliant improvement ideas.
- Boost Innovation: The best ideas often come from the people on the front lines. Fostering a culture of continuous improvement sparks innovation and keeps your business ahead of the curve.
- Efficiency Overhaul: Tired of roadblocks and hiccups? A dedicated hub for improvement ideas allows you to identify and address bottlenecks, enhancing overall efficiency.
So how can you go about gathering this information? We strongly suggest creating a place to manage this within your task/project management tool. From there, you then have a couple of options:
- Allow the team to directly create tasks (ideas) – for this, you may wish to have set fields that need to be completed or a template that loads up on creation to prompt them to gather the information required
- Create a form that allows you to gather the information required
Below are some examples of questions or prompts you should include on your form or template:
- Which Process Are You Addressing? Identify the specific area the suggestion relates to.
- What roadblocks/issues are you facing? Pinpoint what problems the current process is causing.
- What’s Your Improvement Idea? Let the creativity flow! Encourage detailed suggestions for a clear understanding.
- How Will It Benefit the Team/Company? Understanding the impact helps prioritise and implement the best ideas.
- Do You Have a Quick-Win Proposal? Sometimes, small changes lead to significant improvements. Encourage ideas that can be implemented swiftly.
- Any Potential Challenges? Identifying hurdles early on allows for proactive problem-solving.
What should you do once ideas have been submitted?
- Acknowledge and Appreciate: Respond to every submission with gratitude. Acknowledging your team’s effort fosters a positive atmosphere.
- Review and Prioritise: Regularly review submissions, prioritize based on impact and feasibility, and develop an action plan. Use your task management platform to automatically assign incoming ideas to someone within the team so that you can start to take action. Make sure that the workflow status’s are customised for this improvement process. Ideas might include New Idea, In Review, Action Required, In Progress, Complete, No Action Needed. Think about other fields that you might want to track! Ideas for this include a traffic light system for identifying urgency, fields to track the parts of the business that it relates to (people/manpower, technology, administrative, customers, budget, general feedback etc.), the department it relates to (sales, marketing, operations, HR, etc.)
- Implement and Communicate: When an idea gets the green light, implement it! Communicate the change to the team, emphasizing their role in driving positive transformation. Update any standard operating procedures, provide team training, and update links if required.
- Celebrate Success: Share the positive outcomes and celebrate successes as a team. Recognition motivates continuous improvement.
Ready to turn those lightbulb moments into real change? Get started by creating a new place to manage everything within your task/project management tool!
