Engage the Team

What if every American corporation engaged their employees and team members in engineering their corporation for improvement? How much better might things be if EVERY team member was empowered to give feedback to the highest levels to help improve service and performance? What if their feedback was taken seriously and acted upon, with a sense of urgency?

We know that many employees feel disengaged from their corporations, as if they are a faceless number put in place to do a simple task, keep their mouth shut, and go home. Executives are the ones who are supposed to come up with ideas and make the company better; employees are often told, implicitly or explicitly, that it is not their job to be creative or come up with a better way. As the economy crumbled around us over the past two years I am sure there have been numerous times when a bankruptcy or layoff has cost a job and someone asked, “what if I had spoken up and shared that idea?” or “I wish they would have listened to me, I had ideas to help us!”

Our industry has been under near constant assault from policy makers and we have always aimed to create an “open door” culture and an environment where people would take pride in their workplace and work hard to improve their and the company’s performance…but I was somewhat frustrated, knowing there must be hundreds of ideas flowing throughout the organization which were not being shared or acted upon – and with such amazingly bad policy on the table we need all the good ideas we can get! So, like everything else, we created a simple process for feedback; a form team members can fill out and submit to help make a better company. The ideas fall into four critical categories (feel free to email me if you want more information – gsheehan@capemedical.net) and each addresses a strategic priority for our organization moving forward.

So what does this do, did it accomplish anything at all? Did the idle thought and chatter about improvement that happens every day in companies all over the world actually move itself into the formal process? I have 15 ideas on my desk (in the last 1.5 weeks) telling me this is working…many are in various stages of implementation, more are in an analysis stage, and others are completely done and part of our work processes now. All are good, and while each one so far provides only incremental improvement, collectively they will make us a vastly better company than we are today – and I know there are so many more ideas to come!

I carry on ad nauseam about how great our team is – the truth is that all teams, who act and perform like a TEAM and are well lead, have the potential to be great teams. Engaging them, aggressively, and showing the team you appreciate their input and value their ideas is one simple way to accomplish this. A novel idea it is not, but it’s simple, easy and extremely powerful.

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