People often talk about things that do not work smoothly in their workplaces, the things that frustrate them and lower productivity. And this frustration and dissatisfaction about improvements causes all sorts of negative spins to impacting intrinsic motivation. It can send the message that what the workers see is important and what the management sees as important are two different things — that is most likely not going to lead to any sort of workplace engagement and performance improvement.
But the problem is often related to how the problem is presented.
Reasons include:
- People do not fix or care that much about ideas that are not their own.
- Bosses are busy, or at least too busy to spend time listening to ideas
- Improvement may not be measured by the company
- The improvement is not related to your job or their job
- The value and impact of the improvement is not thought out or defined
- Everyone has different perspectives
- The idea not well presented or framed as a business proposition
- The idea not seen as cost effective
- Some interdepartmental collaboration may be required (needs IT or another department or something similar to implement)
What we suggest that supervisors and managers do is to ask people for ideas. But first, we want to engage and involve them and get them to “step back from the wagon and think out of the box” a little.
“Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There” and “The Round Wheels are already in the wagon” are two of the main operational metaphors. The process depends on people actively engaging with the metaphor and generating their own ideas about issues and opportunities.
We accomplish this by using the a general projective tool, the SWs Brainstorm Sheet:
What we do is show them the main illustration and ask small tabletops of 5 to 6 people to brainstorm a bit. What they do is project their beliefs onto the illustration and the group process gives them lots of personal involvement and support and lends itself to more creative thinking and brainstorming. The idea is to get them actively involved and working together around ideas.
You can read a bit more about this theme by clicking on the worksheet icon above to go to another blog post on possibilities thinking.
What we want to do is move the discussion from the general ideas about how things work to some specific issues that they see in their workplace and to then brainstorm more about potential solutions that might be implemented. We eventually move toward a worksheet like this to take specific Square Wheel issues and generate some round wheel possibilities:
Once we define the issues and opportunities, refine our thinking about how an improvement would impact people and performance, and do some discussion about costs and timelines and the required involvement of people, processes and procedures, we can make a good case for change. It is that kind of detailed thinking that needs to be cascaded upward in the organization. People can earn the right to do more as they roll down the road…
The key is to get our wagons rolling downhill a bit!
Hope that helps,
For the FUN of It!
Dr. Scott Simmerman CPF, CPT is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
Scott’s detailed profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.
