That's Just Not Natural - 5 Ways to Squash Employee Involvement

Genuine employee involvement requires an understanding of what employees naturally appreciate when they participate in improvement activities. The following list describes five things employees definitely do not appreciate.

1. forced-march improvement activities
2. someone bringing their own agenda
3. solving problems people don’t care about
4. “dog and pony show” charts and visual management boards
5. someone else having all of the answers

The most popular forced-march activity is the poorly prepared and poorly run, kaizen event.

The most common example of #2 is someone “from above” coming to your location and taking up your valuable time by having you and your coworkers participate in a kaizen or in problem solving meetings you think are a waste of time.

The most frequent cause of #3 is action planning driven from the top down instead of bottom-up. Some projects end up on the list even though they seem to be about nothing more than making the boss look good. In itself, that’s not so bad, but, when important projects to solve real problems are ignored or passed over without good explanation, it really takes the wind out of the improvement sails.

Oh, don’t get me started on #4. A little bit of this may be understandable, but too much is just too hard to swallow.

You know number 5 is at work when employees start to grumble about participating in improvement activities with statements like, “what we say doesn’t matter. They are going to do whatever they want to do anyway.”