In this blog post, we'd like to share two recent episodes from our KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Podcast.

Are you struggling to drive a continuous improvement culture in your organization?

Do you need to revive a CI culture that has lost momentum? 

If you’re like so many others, it can be difficult to know which questions to ask, and where to start.

Jeff Roussel, chief revenue officer of KaiNexus and a true continuous improvement leader and believer, recently joined Allison Greco, founder of Continuous Improvement International, to talk about how you can build a continuous improvement culture. To watch a full recap, click here.

KaiNexus customers capture more daily improvements from staff, run more efficient strategic projects and events, coach more effectively, and streamline their improvement process. They engage everyone from the frontlines to the executive leaders in a thriving improvement culture to accelerate their rate of change—and it shows. The more engaged your employees are with improvement work, the more impact you’ll see.

With KaiNexus, organizations receive anywhere from 2-10x the number of ideas from their employees, and the average idea in KaiNexus is worth $15,000. Most customers also pay back their entire investment in KaiNexus by implementing one idea—now, who wouldn’t want that?

Let’s take a detailed look at how your organization can drive ROI with KaiNexus:

Imagine going on a family road trip but not bringing your family. Do some people stay behind so they can experience the trip through the photos you send them? I’m willing to bet that more often than not, you bring the whole family. After all, it’s a lot more fun for you - and for them - to share in the joy together!

The same concept applies to continuous improvement and why everyone needs to be a part of the improvement system.

When you’re on the hunt for a platform that can facilitate your improvement culture, it can be tempting to limit the rollout to a handful of improvement experts and managers rather than engaging the masses. Whether you’re making this choice to save money, to keep things simple, or because you don’t think everyone will engage anyway, it’s a mistake to leave people behind.

Here are a few reasons why you don’t want to go down that route:

The principles of Lean and continuous improvement methodologies originated from manufacturing, but there’s no doubt that they have been applied to other industries quite successfully, such as nuclear energy. The nuclear industry believes that there is no defect or opportunity that is too small to go after, and there’s always room for improvement. This important principle is a cornerstone belief of what many refer to as a High-Reliability Organization or HRO. 

With the blistering speed of this summer’s news cycle, we can’t blame you if you’ve already forgotten about the single largest security incident in Twitter’s history that took place on July 15 but was a doozy. It was also a teachable moment for Twitter and every other organization that involves people and technology. 

What Happened?

Early in the day on July 15, 2020, Twitter’s automated detection systems flagged some suspicious activity. Several Twitter accounts with short handles, like @USA, @drug, @love, and others, seemed to be compromised. These short handles are valued among certain hacker communities, so Twitter knows to keep an eye out for unusual access. The appropriate people were notified, and they began looking into the issue. Security incidents like this are common when you have a platform with hundreds of millions of users.

Recognizing and rewarding employees on their efforts is a critical component of a continuous improvement culture. Without recognition, it’s typically challenging to drive employee engagement. Your employees need you to recognize the work and contributions they make, and as a result of recognition, they’ll continue to produce work that both you and them are proud of.  The recognition program can range from something as simple as thanking them for their work, or you can have a more formal program like Employee of the Month.

The team at Rockwater put together a program to encourage KaiNexus participation and drive overall continuous improvement engagement. Here’s more detail on the participation and bonus program they created.

While definitions of “employee engagement” abound, they all come back to an employee’s emotional and psychological investment in their work. When employees are engaged, they are willing and able to contribute to the company’s success. That is why companies with engaged employees are 21% more profitable than those without.

It’s important to note that employee engagement and employee satisfaction/happiness are not the same. An employee can be happy with their salary, working conditions, perks, and even management, but they still may not invest discretionary effort to achieve the goals of the organization. This means that addressing problems with engagement requires more than a bonus, extra holiday, or company picnic.

So what should you do if you suspect one or more of your employees are disengaged? Every situation is unique, but here are some good ways to address the issue.

During the early stages of KaiNexus, our chief executive officer, Greg Jacobson, and our chief revenue officer, Jeff Roussel, put together a few key points that capture the core values of KaiNexus. Recently, I got the opportunity to sit down (via video chat) with Greg and Jeff to have them shed some light on our beliefs.

At KaiNexus, we base our work and everyday lives around 10 key points. Not only do we practice and embody these beliefs, but we also hope to spread them to the people we interact with on a daily basis. Join me as we walk through the 10 beliefs of KaiNexus.

Many leaders are finding themselves faced with the task of managing a 100% remote team for the first time. The challenge is amplified by the fact that remote work is new to most employees, and even getting together for an in-person meeting once in a while is impossible.

Unfortunately, business challenges and process defects don’t disappear because there’s a pandemic. In many cases, they just get worse. That’s why we’ve been getting questions about how to operate tried and true improvement tools in this new reality.

This post offers some things to think about if you are going to hold a kaizen event with a remote workforce. It assumes that you have some experience with kaizen events, if not, we recommend you start with this article.

Here are 10 special considerations for remote kaizen events.