THE SITUATION – The benefits of increasing employee engagement are well understood: decreased absenteeism, decreased safety incidents, decreased employee turnover, increased profitability, increased productivity and sales.
However the existing system for measurement of engagement is an employee survey of “satisfaction and commitment to the company” is fine for episodic annual measurements but not as a tool for continuous improvement of your system for improving employee engagement.
NEW METRIC – The new system metric is the number of improvements to human work systems per employee per year. Tracking this metric gives us an ability to draw control charts – starting on a monthly basis and then as the system volume improves it moves to weekly. The initial goal for engagement is 10 improvements to how the work gets done per employee per year.
The ideal measure of improvements is changes to the organizations Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s). SOP’s provide clear documentation of how the work of your organization gets done. They are the foundation of successful and sustainable process improvement.
IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGE – The challenge with SOP changes being the metric for employee engagement is that most organizations do not have SOP’s or if they do they are either out of date or not broadly accessible by team members.
EASY STARTING POINT – Two Step SOP – The easy way to get started is to use a two step process for documentation.
The first step is a simple explanation of work process changes
- Name of Work System Change
- Name of Person(s) who Created the Change
- Background on System Purpose & Problem
- Solution detailed Step by Step
- Quantified Value of Change or Estimate of It
- Name of peer(s) who helped improve description
- Name of person(s) who Approved the Change
The second step is to publish the changes
- Names of Changes w/ Link to Details
- For Trade Secrets Only the Name is Published
- Include Summary Control Chart of # of Changes
The third step is to update your Formal SOP if you have one
- Translate informal to your formal SOP format
- Add to Centralized SOP Database
- If formal SOPs are not available file informal one
YES IT IS WORTH THE EFFORT – The truth is that broken systems and low employee engagement are the root cases of 94% of the stresses, headaches and frustrations of team members, managers and leadership. That said, the journey from a culture of chaos and fire fighting to one of never ending continuous improvement requires patience. The good news is that the process will build momentum on it’s own. As one team member said to me when I told her it would take time, “Doug I don’t care how long it takes. The fact that we are finally confronting the chaos gives me hope for the future.”
A THREE STEP SYSTEM
Cheers
Doug Hall
Founder – Eureka! Ranch
Co-Founder – Dexter Bourbon Company at the Brain Brew Distillery
I’m On My Way to London & Glasgow in early June…
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