When trying to introduce changes that we believe will make positive improvements in the running of a business, there is often the desire to rush. While urgency and efficiency are important, they can result in slapdash results that harm your organisation in the long run.
This is particularly true when it comes to involvement policy and processes. These require the investment and consideration of all your employees to work, which takes time. So, too, does the process of developing processes that suit your workplace. That is why you should take it step-by-step, experiment and observe, and more.
Below, we’ll explain how you can create quick involvement process drafts that offer you early wins but remain adaptable and flexible.
Wanting to get things perfectly the first is not a bad thing but it can lead to “analysis paralysis”. This happens if you only make room for perfection when designing processes. You will need to anticipate every possible exception, challenge, risk etc. and come up with possible solutions all at once. This leads to a lot more work for you and the people executing the strategy.
Implementing an involvement process this way also removes room for learning and adaptability, hindering you from finding process patterns that suit how you and your team. Your process becomes baggage on everyone's shoulders that doesn’t fit into your workflow and gets in the way of productivity. This may become unbearable and lead to staff finding every excuse to abandon the new process and go back to their old ways of doing things.
So, our advice to prevent this from happening is to draft a rough version of the process before diving head first into implementing a whole new process across the organisation.
To create a rough draft, map out your general involvement process and start field testing it with a small percentage of the intended user base. Doing this will give you insight into how the process works on the ground and how effective it is.
Monitor how the process is performing over a set period of time. This enables you to get data on how the process changes productivity within this set of users and how it has impacted their involvement. For example, have they logged more observations since adopting the new process? By evaluating how the process is performing and gaining this real-world information, you can identify and make improvements to the process.
Additionally, you get valuable feedback from your team. This way, you can fix any arising issues and avoid dealing with them on a much larger scale later.
Over time, you can help the process unfold and grow organically and evolve into the perfect way for your employees to add value and input to your business.
Getting your staff interested and involved in your business and its vision is essential to its success. However, approaching employee involvement and engagement in a rigid and rushed way can hurt your workplace culture as people are often resistant to change.
Instead, start with a small group so that you can identify issues early on and make involvement smoother as it unfolds across your organisation.
If you're looking for a platform to collect more data to monitor your organisation's incident reporting practices, Falcony | Observe have you covered. You can find more information on our website or test out our 30-day free trial:
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.