by John Quirke, Shingo Recipient Author and Partner, S A Partners
Very few, if any, people in business feel that they are in a stable environment. Perhaps this is because businesses face constant pressure to grow, change, and improve. This pressure may arise from external sources, or it may be self-imposed but, either way, the journey to attain levels of sustainable excellence is seldom direct or easy.
During the coming years, the challenges to business activity will reach new heights as the realities of climate change impact businesses. Now more than ever, organizations must begin to truly define their purpose and how they align and engage all employees to that purpose.
However, there is a sad reality here. Most organizations have not clearly defined what their purpose is, probably because organizations are driven by the constant charge for shareholder value. But driving shareholder value is not a purpose.
Even organizations that focus on the customer (such as patients, in the case of pharmaceutical and life science companies) struggle to define their true purpose. These companies may describe the exceptional lengths they have gone to in providing medicines to a particular patient. Some patients may be asked to describe the life-changing effect the medicines or treatment provided had on their lives. While these are very impactful stories and can bring a reality to the work team members do, the exposure to this story is limited to very few individuals in a company. Rarely are frontline hourly operators exposed to such conversations. Instead, they are presented with posters and statements made by people they have difficulty relating to. This is disconnection of the story from the daily reality of the work team members are doing.
They ask, “How can we say that we are all about the patient when our processes are slow, inefficient, overly complex, and unpredictable?”
Or, “We could provide more reliable and even less costly service to our patients if we just focused on improving the way our work works!”
These are regular conversations I have had in many high-profile organizations. The reality of the engagement they feel within an organization is grounded in the day-to-day and week-to-week experiences of their work, how their work works, and the conversations they have with their leaders and colleagues about the work.
In our experience, organizations that are focused on a true purpose begin with the team members. What are their needs, desires, dreams? How do they seek purpose in their lives? These are powerful conversations, and they transcend any conversation about what the business does.
In effect, we see it as flipping the conversation. The organization should be there to help its people achieve their goals in life. The more successful the organization is, the more it can help its people achieve their personal goals. This may translate to participating in self-development, working within the community, dealing with financial challenges, being part of something unique, opening a new factory, or developing a new product. These are the conversations that truly engage hearts and minds.
But how often do we have these conversations? In many organizations, one-on-one personal development conversations do not take place at the shopfloor level at all. If they do happen, they might be rushed and empty, like completing a tick box exercise. The situation with contact laborers is even worse. These people often fall outside any such development conversations because they are viewed as hourly labor, a cost. They are not seen as individuals with personal desires who, given the right environment, will willingly share their insights and experiences of the work and how that work could be improved. And these frontline groups are the very groups that make the difference between winning or losing.
Transformative Participation and Sustainable Excellence
The ideal scenario for organizations to truly cope with the ever-changing business landscape is to develop a genuine, deep-rooted culture of transformative participation. Developing a culture of transformative participation in an organization drives a completely new level of expectation around engagement and the value an individual derives from his or her work. (The term transformative participation has been used in recent years to explain the need to actively involve and engage minority groups in the design and implementation of legislative reform to protect vulnerable habitats around the world.)
In today’s businesses, many groups are often excluded from decisions and changes that directly relate to the way they work. There can be many reasons for this, such as compliance considerations, insufficient knowledge and skills, not enough time to seek and analyze inputs, even union considerations. Often, this reasoning falls into a subtle policy where token engagement is sought that has little impact on the outcome. If this continues, teams rapidly become disengaged, which makes an obvious impact on business performance.
Creating the expectation that transformative participation must exist across the organization sets a base-level cultural expectation. It galvanizes the fact that every individual has a role in contributing to and improving the work, the work environment, and how the organization contributes to the communities in which it operates.
Engagement with purpose is driven by every meeting, every measure, and every improvement. Engagement with purpose must connect with the work and people’s approach to that work.
Transformative participation is the active manifestation of sustainable excellence. It creates a cultural expectation of those who work for the business and those who manage and lead the business. It is the expression of a culture of continuous improvement and a relentless call to action to make tomorrow better in all aspects of the way work is executed, resources are consumed, and goals are achieved.
Our combined futures will depend on a renewed focus on the work that we do and how that work makes the most effective and efficient use of the available resources. The reality will be that many organizations will not adjust or will no longer provide a service that is considered valuable. Focusing organizational purpose on the individual as an element of transformative movement will become even more pressing. Organizations must begin to truly grasp the opportunity to engage every individual as they experience the challenges that lie ahead. This can be done as they remember and apply the guidance and principles of the Shingo Model.
“People are the only organizational asset with an infinite ability to increase in value.”
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