Key Points

• Actively involve your employees in the process improvement cycle, and ask for input and feedback.
• Cross-functional teams and collaboration are crucial for the success of engagement and process improvement.
• Providing transparent communication is a fantastic way to engage your employees and keep them apprised of the process improvement cycle.

Promoting employee engagement while going through the cycle of process improvements doesn’t seem like something that is generally done. However, you can actively engage your employees throughout all steps of the process. This has tangible benefits, as your employees feel involved in the entire cycle of process improvements.

Lean Six Sigma is a team effort, so making sure everyone is involved is an important task. With that in mind, we’re looking today at how you can construct your Lean Six Sigma projects while actively targeting employee engagement. Further, we’ll discuss some key strategies to make the whole thing a breeze to get implemented.

Why Is Employee Engagement Important?

Lean Six Sigma flourishes when everyone is on the same page. That’s why whenever we discuss a project utilizing LSS, it is in the context of the entire organization rather than a select few. However, it can be difficult to motivate your team to adhere to the principles, teachings, and tools if they aren’t engaged with the material.

Flashback to your time in school. You likely had a subject you disliked with a passion. For me, it was geometry. It isn’t a matter of disliking the material, however, but rather a lack of engagement. When you have someone willing to guide you and engage you with the material, you’re far more likely to succeed with it, no matter what it might be.

As such, employee engagement becomes paramount to the success of any project. When everyone is on board, that means a process improvement cycle is far more likely to succeed in the long run. This is likely something you’ve encountered time and time again as well if you’re in a leadership position.

Working As a Team

Teamwork is a cornerstone of any business. As the old saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. To this end, it is important to encourage and foster an environment where teamwork is the default, rather than going off by yourself to get something done. Not only does this remove things like inherent biases from the decision-making process, but it also brings a wealth of different experiences to the fore.

As we’ll discuss further on in today’s piece, getting employee engagement running as intended is going to accelerate the efficacy of your process improvement cycles. It simply isn’t enough to know the ins and outs of Lean Six Sigma like the back of your hand. You have to get everyone else to embody those principles for the best chances of success.

What it boils down to at the end of the day is giving a sense of ownership to the members of your team. When they have a stake in the chances of success for your business’s projects, they will be far more inclined to guarantee that said projects succeed in the first place.

Driving Employee Engagement in Six Sigma Projects

We’ve highlighted the importance of employee engagement, but how do you get things rolling with your process improvement endeavors? Thankfully, this isn’t a complicated question. There are some surefire strategies you can utilize to get things rolling and maintain employee engagement consistently with every project you set out to complete.

Lean Six Sigma is a methodology centered around the pursuit of quality. This isn’t just quality on a product or service level. Nor does it apply to the likes of making sure your production workflow is working to its best possible ability. An organization has to be centered around the notion of quality for this to truly succeed.

To this end, when trying to promote employee engagement with any process improvement cycle, consider this another piece of the puzzle. You’re not just looking at the nuts and bolts of the production line, but also the flesh and blood people at the center of your workforce.

Cross-Functional Teams

If you aren’t at this point, cross-functional teams are simply a must in Lean Six Sigma. This not only drives employee engagement but also benefits your process improvement cycles in other ways. A cross-functional team brings the expertise and knowledge of a completely different department to your current efforts. Further, this sort of team is a great way for your employees to engage one another and learn from each other.

As such, if you haven’t tried constructing them on your own, there has never been a better time to do so. You’ll likely find you have a more effective and fruitful production cycle when you start driving employee engagement through cross-functional teams.

That said, you’ll want to make sure your teams are keen to communicate and collaborate, which we’ll discuss a little further.

Ask for Input

Often, at least with experienced leadership, you’ll find yourself just venturing off on your own when it comes time to start constructing a process improvement effort. This is fine and dandy for most organizations, I suppose, but it doesn’t drive employee engagement in the slightest. Instead, this is one area where you’ll want to ask for input and feedback on the way things are done.

This gives your team a sense of ownership of how things are going to proceed from here and allows you to explore the subject more intensely. You aren’t just soliciting opinions on how to proceed from here, but also on how you can best get your team working toward the same common goal by explaining the stakes and parameters of the project at hand.

Communication Avenues

Communication is key for the modern workplace, and you’ll want to make sure you’re providing plenty of avenues for your employees to be heard. One way this can be accomplished is by providing constant status updates on the current progress of a project. Being left in the dark can be disheartening and is terrible for overall employee morale.

However, by giving your team a place to understand and discuss the current proceedings of a project, you’re promoting more employee engagement. Further, this is a great way to get a feel for the concerns and ideas your team has on how to best proceed with the phases of a process improvement cycle.

Training

Sometimes, a lack of employee engagement can be attributed to a lack of knowledge when it comes to Lean Six Sigma. That isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but it’s something you’ll need to adjust. Having training and resources available to explore and better understand Lean Six Sigma is a great way to promote employee engagement.

Training is a constant for any modern business, and having those resources freely available means you’ve got employees taking the initiative and getting themselves up to speed with how to best proceed from here.

Leadership Opportunities

We often think of leadership as something that is bestowed upon a person after proving themselves in the workplace. However, this is an area where you can certainly kickstart employee engagement. By delegating authority and responsibility to members of your team, they now have a stake in how the progress and success of a project impacts the whole organization.

That isn’t meant to be overly punitive by any means, but it better hones the skills and knowledge for your employees. Leadership doesn’t have to be some nebulous concept for the lower-level employees to aspire to. Instead, it can be something where they get a taste for how things work while improving their skills and education.

Foster a Culture of Continuous Improvement

My final talking point is going to be one we parrot on about ad nauseam, it would seem. A culture of continuous improvement isn’t one where you’re looking at how to best accomplish the next project. Instead, it is something where you can take any freshly hired employee and guarantee them they will be a better, more knowledgeable person.

These aren’t skills that just hold to a single position either, but rather something they can with them for the rest of their lives. As such, employee engagement isn’t just about getting the work done, but about building a better, more skilled workforce on the whole.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Looking for something else to go with your morning scrolling? You might want to consider learning how you can harness big data in your Lean Six Sigma projects. Big data is a powerful tool, but requires a deft touch to make the most of it.

Additionally, you might want to look at how to bridge the generational skills divide with Lean Six Sigma. Understanding how to effectively communicate and get your team up to snuff can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Conclusion

Increasing employee engagement with your process improvement efforts is a great way of keeping things fresh and exciting for your employees. Not only are you empowering them, but you’re giving them valuable skills they can carry with them for the rest of their careers.

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