Organizations kill off workplace improvements in two main ways, Inertia and Disincentives.
Inertia
As a team member, have you ever identified a way to improve how you do your work, and been rejected?
“IT didn’t approve that.” “That’s nice, but we’re not going to implement that.” “We don’t have that kind of change on our roadmap for the quarter.”
That’s dismissive. Hearing that, you’ve likely thought “Well, I’m not going to try again.”
Company inertia and resistance to change kills many valuable refinements, and kills the interest to suggest ideas at all.
Disincentive
The other side of the coin is that if your idea does get adopted, you’ll be lucky to get a pat on the back and maybe a pizza party.
Imagine building an automation as a side project that saves every developer in a 50-dev company a total of 1 hour a week. That’s 50 developer-hours a week – a bit more than a full developer worth of time. It wasn’t your job role, just an idea you formed because the existing process bugged you and wasted your time.
You’ve given the company the equivalent of a developer for free. Odds are you probably won’t get a bonus, raise, or promotion. The company will thank you for your efforts, pocket the productivity gain, and revise targets and goals upwards based on the new improvements.
Talk about disincentive.
This is not an argument that people should receive the exact computed savings as a bonus or raise. However, when someone creates a genuine savings of material impact, it breaks an implicit social contract to claim all the value of the improvement for the company.
Once you start rewarding improvements in a meaningful way, you will need to build some reliable practice of evaluating improvements and linking rewards to value saved or created. It’s either that or you get rat farms.
Seems like a worthwhile system to create. The alternative is that people lose all interest in making work easier to do. And you can’t afford that.
Do you want to continue to grow as an organization? Support innovation and improvement, don’t kill it through inertia and disincentivizing it.
Pizza parties and positive reviews won’t cut it.
You can change this. I can help.