Quality management programs are often associated with large organizations, such as automotive manufacturing or large healthcare systems. These organizations often have teams dedicated to quality control, and they may leverage specific business process methodologies such as Lean or Six Sigma. While that level of sophistication may not be possible or even necessary for your business, there are still many continuous quality improvement tools that are easy to implement and can have an enormous impact on your organization, no matter its size.

Some of the following tools have been borrowed from Total Quality Management, Lean, and the Toyota production system. Still, they can be used independently of these methodologies to accelerate improvement in any organization.

Company culture is what makes one organization different from the next. The team's shared values, goals, and expectations contribute to a thriving organizational culture. Leaders who are dedicated to continuous improvement make it the cornerstone of their organization's culture.

Most leaders will agree that a culture of accountability and ownership is essential if the goal is to achieve operational excellence. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t take the steps necessary to build accountability into the day-to-day practices of individuals at every level. Like everything else that has to do with organizational culture, accountability will not happen by accident. The good news is that leaders can take some simple yet powerful steps to bake in a sense of responsibility and positive engagement. 

Long before COVID-19 disrupted everyday life across the globe, the shift to a more distributed, flexible, and agile workforce was well underway. In 2019, more than 4.3 million Americans worked from home at least part-time. Virtual work has grown by 115% in the last decade. The pandemic transformed remote work from an option to a requirement for millions of more workers overnight. 

Transforming corporate culture is not a small undertaking. There are usually both tangible and intangible costs. When done effectively, the long-term advantages far outweigh the costs of living with a culture that isn't thriving, but how do you measure the impact of such a change? After all, much of what constitutes corporate culture is intangible. 

For that reason, the goal isn't really to measure the culture but rather to measure the outcomes that are impacted by the culture. This is much more practicable and useful because these results directly affect the value of the organization. Of course, the exact metrics you measure will depend on the goal of your culture change effort. However, with the right tools in place and thoughtful planning, you'll be able to demonstrate the real-world benefits your culture initiative achieves.

Most leaders would agree that culture is an essential element of the success of any organization. However, in a study by the HR company, Hayes, 46% of employees cited culture as the reason they quit their job. Clearly, there is room for improvement when it comes to workplace culture.

Before we get into the signs and symptoms of a dysfunctional culture, it is helpful to outline what culture does in business.

What is Operational Excellence?

Executing a business strategy more effectively and consistently than the competition is called Operational Excellence. Ideally, every employee can see the flow of value to the customer and fix it when the flow is interrupted.

We are often asked if continuous improvement and operational excellence are the same. They are not, but they are closely related. Continuous improvement involves constantly improving your business operations to reduce waste, cut costs, improve quality, and maximize human potential. It focuses on making each existing process perfect. Operational excellence goes further. It involves setting the organization up for growth by understanding what the market wants and creating an uninterrupted value stream that continuously feeds the need.

A high-reliability organization (HRO) is an organization that is successful in avoiding catastrophes despite a high level of risk and complexity. Specific examples are air traffic control systems, nuclear power plants, naval aircraft carriers, and hospitals. In each of these cases, even a minor mistake can lead to catastrophic results.

Nonetheless, adverse outcomes in these types of organizations are very unusual. How can that be?

Fortunately, we don’t have to guess the answer. Thanks to researchers Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe and the case studies they created, we know precisely which attitudes have taken root in these “High-Reliability Organizations.” The good news is that your organization doesn’t need to deal with life-or-death risk to apply the principles that create an environment where error-free operations are the norm.

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.

The world was first introduced to kaizen's philosophy and practice in 1986 with Masaaki Imai's book, Kaizen, The Key to Japan's Competitive Success. Today, it still holds up as an excellent read for anyone interested in finding ways to make their organization more successful at achieving continuous improvement. 

While kaizen concepts are straightforward, volumes have been written about how organizations build the improvement mindset into operations and culture. Our goal with this post is to give you the basic framework of kaizen and hopefully leave you excited about exploring the ways you might begin to transform your organization into one that consistently exhibits operational excellence.