Integration between innovation and continuous improvement are essential to thriving businesses
Have you worked somewhere where the powers that be say that they are looking for new ideas? Or there is an “Innovation Committee”? Or even giving employees cash for something new?
Innovation is an important part of the workplace. New products and services often keep an organization viable into the future. It isn’t always the leadership team who comes up with the latest thoughts and in fact, it’s normally the engineers, the product managers, the customer service team, those who work in the field or with the customers who think of items that will satisfy customers and solve issues.
It isn’t always the new product though or the new service that should be prized. A closely related topic is when people figure out a new way to solve a problem or enhance a process. These ideas don’t usually get the bonus or the recognition, but they should.
Ways to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace
Wouldn’t our companies be better served if we encouraged our employees to look for new ways to solve old issues? There are lots of ways that we could do this:
- Look through the complaints that the company gets. This is an easy way to use customer feedback to try to fix items. I’d encourage you to affinitize these complaints and look at any patterns that seem larger. You could also categorize them by ease of improvement to get a few wins under your belt before you go after something bigger.
- If you don’t keep complaints or they’re not easy to find, you can survey your customers and find out what they would like to have fixed. It can be where you focus on the lowest performing quantitative items or you can look at the qualitative comments and again, try to affininitze them so you aren’t reacting on each individual idea.
- You can also survey your internal team to see what they are hearing. At times, this can be more problematic because there is bias from employees as they may remember the last thing they heard or they may be interested in giving more difficult to work with problems lower marks, but it is a way to query. You could combine the internal team output with the customer survey as well.
- If you work somewhere where you have staff that fixes or catalogues problems, this is another area to investigate, such as service, quality, customer service, etc. You may notice for example, that there is volume in a certain product being returned and there could be a flaw there that hasn’t been fixed.
- There are also other types of improvement opportunities, such as in a process. You could check and see if there are SOPs for what is done within the organization. If there aren’t any or most processes aren’t documented, that is a great place to begin as you can often see what doesn’t make sense once documentation occurs and others are reviewing it. If your processes are documented, then having others quality check them to see if they are easy to follow or if there are other ways perhaps to do something. There may be ways to automate for example or another group to handle something or a more efficient method.
- You could determine the biggest bottlenecks in your department (or time killers or things that no one likes to do, etc.) and have a facilitated brainstorming sessions on other ways to handle these items.
- There are a lot of quality tools an organization can use in order to become more productive and it’s a great opportunity for others to expand their knowledge and lead a team. These quality tools could be used in a department or division meeting which is a great use of the group’s knowledge, an opportunity for a member of the department to shine within a group setting, a way to improve and innovate and a way to bring multiple perspectives together in a positive manner. You could have people think of a way to do something better within the group and rank them in order of which would make the biggest impact.
The idea here is that innovation and improvement can come in many shapes and sizes and all should be celebrated. Bringing a new product or service to launch is a giant achievement and is worthy of a lot of time and energy. Process improvements also are another form of innovation that help us meet and exceed business goals.