Measures to promote cultural change in companies

Only 5% of employees contribute with ideas for improvement in the daily change of their company, a process in which only 30% of the workforce is involved, according to the latest study by the Kaizen Institute, an international consulting firm specializing in continuous improvement and process optimization. The work proposes a series of solutions in the daily management of projects to involve each of the professionals, turning the entire workforce into drivers of change.

The consultancy firm has carried out an analysis of cultural change in companies and its drivers, determining that the further down the organizational hierarchy you go, the less motivated you are to change.

Thus, while 63% of managers and 59% of directors are in favor of change, only 45% of employees are in favor of change.

According to the results of its analysis, 94% of employees do not understand their company's strategy, causing them to work independently and not feel in a position to contribute ideas for improvement.

Experts from the consulting firm explain that the execution of the strategy must be carried out through a wide deployment of actions, making it understandable for all hierarchical levels of the company and thus improving their involvement.

On the positive side, 50% of companies have already initiated a cultural change movement internally, but the process is slowed down by the fact that a large part of the workforce is not involved in it. This is a serious error in the execution of the strategy and can be corrected by applying team dynamics, for example," says Borja Iglesias, director at Kaizen Institute.

The improvement ideas of professionals are the basis of disruptive projects that represent 20% of additional revenue for companies. At this point, Kaizen Institute detects that after the approach of the idea, companies show difficulties to design a plan with which to achieve this result.

37% of the projects fail due to the lack of clear objectives and 41% of the departments do not implement standard project management policies, the consequences of which, according to the consultancy firm, are:

•Lack of structured and frequent monitoring of business indicators.

• Lack of planning of the team's work.

• Unilateral decisions, taken by the leader and then shared with the team.

• Difficulty in articulating the work of the central and local platforms.

The solutions proposed by Kaizen Institute to avoid these errors in the daily management routine, improve the involvement of professionals in the strategy and make them part of the cultural change of the organization are:

•Training and coaching in the new procedures created. This will allow each professional to understand what is changing and why, feeling involved in the process and empowering him/her to contribute ideas for improvement.

• Collaboration and mutual support between all departments of the company, so that everyone understands the role of the rest and their involvement in the common strategy of the organization, getting all areas to work in the same direction.

• Participation of the whole team in the discussions of the problems and in the decision making of the project they are working on.

• Efficient meetings, with the necessary information in visual charts that simplify the content and facilitate its comprehension.

 Identify objectives and a system of indicators for the staff to be involved and follow up the evolution towards the established objective. The fact that everyone in the company knows the objective, and can have indicators according to each area or level facilitates this monitoring and motivation.