Why Bother To Broadcast Improvements?

We’ve written before about how continuous improvement is a team sport. One of the best things about playing on a team is that the success of each individual contributes to the success of the whole. When the ace pitcher gets the last out, everyone on the team wins (and if it is the 7^th game of the World Series, grown men hug). Your team might not get as excited over a resolved opportunity for improvement as Buster Posy and Madison Bumgarner, but they should have the opportunity to celebrate.

Broadcasting team results is an important element of a successful continuous improvement campaign. The KaiNexus solution was designed with this in mind. We’ve made every effort to ensure that the right people are notified about things that matter to them. To broadcast improvements' impacts supports your efforts in a number of ways.

Publicize Best Practices

Although most companies encourage cross-functional collaboration, it isn’t uncommon for departments, teams, or locations to operate in distinct, disconnected silos.  This means that most of the opportunities for improvement suggested will be limited to the work area of the employee who identifies it. However, in many cases, the idea could be useful to individuals and teams in other parts of the organization. That’s why KaiNexus makes it easy for leaders to share the impact of each improvements with other groups or the entire organization. Now every success can be fully leveraged more widely.

Maximize Collaboration

KaiNexus takes aim at organizational silos in another way by encouraging people from all parts of the organization to come together to solve common problems. Broadcasting improvements helps support collaboration in a way that isn’t possible if improvements are tracked in spreadsheets or on whiteboards. Keeping the entire team informed of progress, impact and success helps everyone feel like part of the game and encourages input from a diverse set of individuals in different departments or even different sites.

Inspire Involvement

In working with our customers, we have seen a significant uptick in employee engagement in improvement activities following the broadcast of a successfully implemented opportunity for improvement. This happens because:

• Broadcasting improvement success sends a strong signal to the organization that leaders care about these efforts. It sets the expectation that innovation and improvement are the responsibility of every player. Everyone wants to be recognized and improvement broadcasting shows the team exactly how they can make improvement happen.
• When improvements are shared, the prior work can be built upon and the next project can rise to a new level. Knowledge builds and the impact grows over time.
• It is important to recognize the valued efforts of both those who initiate the idea for improvement and those who work to see it through to resolution. KaiNexus makes this easy by capturing the contributions at every step.

Improvement broadcasting shouldn’t be an afterthought or something that is set apart from your continuous improvement efforts. By building it into our solution, KaiNexus has made this form of recognition a natural extension of innovation and improvement for our clients. We’re proud of that because we believe that teamwork is essential to organizational achievement.