I’m convinced that the greatest obstacle to improvement in today’s corporate world is our obsession with “BIG” projects.

If it’s not going to immediately save the company a million dollars, then it’s not worth pursuing as a quality improvement effort.

In asking for these rare BIG ideas, leaders unintentionally “freak out” their employees. Faced with significant workplace change, even if it is a positive one, employees tend to fear the future. As a result, staff hunker down. The flow of creative ideas simply shuts down.

The best way to create a culture of creativity and innovation is to cultivate small changes that don’t create fear. What’s the smallest change we could easily make to improve this problem?

In his book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement (3rd Ed.), Mark Graban illustrates how several organizations empowered their employees to do exactly that — make small changes to improve their workplace:

  • Using 5S to create an identical layout for hospital nursing stations, so that when staff transfer between stations they can work more efficiently because the layout is the same.
  • Alerting hospital staff to the emotional state of a patient who just delivered a stillborn infant by putting an unobtrusive visual indicator, such as a small angel emblem, on the patient’s door.
  • Redesigning a doctor’s office check in area to make it more convenient from the patient’s perspective.

Once employees have the opportunity to participate in small changes like these, they gain confidence and build problem solving skills. Then, they are more likely to discover larger changes, and be ready to take them on.

From a time perspective, it’s often easier to find 20 minutes or an hour to work on a small problem (and a small solution) here and there within the work day. As a result, many health care organizations have demonstrated that, through gradually working on small ideas (literally thousands of them), they can still save millions of dollars a year. Now that is a BIG idea!

How are you helping your employees to work smarter by reducing the amount of time they spend on non-productive activities and correcting errors? If your business processes need a “check-up,” please email me at michael@leadingchangeforgood.com! I’d love to help you get back to a healthy, productive workplace.