To successfully nurture a culture of Lean Continuous Improvement (CI), it’s important to think about mindset. How do you create a working culture that is intrinsically motivated to solve problems one small step at a time? What CI offers companies is, to paraphrase the great Neil Armstrong, “one small step for teams, one giant leap for company culture”…
The Importance of Mutual Respect
Fundamental to Lean Continuous Improvement (CI) is mutual respect. Respecting the people who get the work done, those who deliver the end value to the customer. Analysing the way someone does their job and asking them to change the way work is hard. Your team may, at times, be exposed to a range of emotions – maybe fear and vulnerability.
Creating an environment of trust and empathy, where concerns can be voiced and opinions can be heard, is key to success. People need to know that they’re not alone in feeling uncomfortable and that changes will make their jobs easier and help the company, as a whole, move forwards.
A Workplace Constitution for Lean Continuous Improvement
One way that we have approached this within our team at Rugged Data is to create a constitution to promote a mindset for continuous improvement. In any workplace, things can get tough and occasionally heated.
It’s useful to have this constitution, therefore, to help teams quickly get back on track if/when values become misaligned. The longer these values remain in conflict, the greater the risk that important working relationships, or creative potential, can become damaged – sometimes even irreparably.
When everyone does the right things for the right reasons, it helps our team as a whole to move forwards to achieve our core mission. We talk about it, whiteboard it, sometimes tweak it and then print it and put it up on our wall as shared culture. We’ve customised it on our slack channels to continually reinforce it.
That last point is vital; a good workplace constitution is only good if it’s open to change and progress. Company goals pivot, guiding principles can shift, and so if you display a reverential adherence to a workplace constitution that hasn’t changed in the best part of a decade, then you could find your company is being held back.
Continuous improvement is exactly that – continuous. So, there’s no reason why your workplace manifesto shouldn’t continually be improving, too. A framework and backbone for your company’s direction? Yes. An inflexible ideology? Far from it.
Do you agree? We’ve listed our constitution below, but what would you add to your mindset?
How Can Rugged Data Help?
Here at Rugged Data, we can offer you a long-lasting technological partnership designed to help streamline your processes, and eliminate inefficiencies in the field. How do we do this? Through our bespoke mobile forms and reporting software.
Using this, we can take your reporting processes and design fully-fledged mobile applications to make them quicker, easier and less prone to error. Complete with intuitive mobile forms, automatic calculations, auto-populating fields, schematic diagrams, and whatever else your technicians might need, we’ve designed our technology to make your company more efficient, and your employees’ lives more straightforward.
Helping You to Help Yourselves
But we offer so much more than just a form-building software, because our Lean-qualified Rugged Data coaches will help review your current processes by video call, step-by-step, to see where improvements in efficiency can be made, and how it could work in an app. For example, we’ll implement mandatory form filling, to make sure no important fields are left unanswered – something which often happens with paper reporting.
From your perspective, you have to do very little. We work with your company to streamline your existing processes, building your app, going back and forth until it’s just right for what your business needs. Then, we train your teams on how to use the app (if required) and provide ongoing support, as well as implementing any tweaks and changes to a form (based on compliance updates, for instance) in the future.
Provide Your Existing Forms
The first step is to provide us with your current forms, and take us through the process step-by-step so we know what to include in an app.
App Creation
Following that, the app is created and we’ll ask for some initial feedback.
Early Adopter User
After that, we suggest an ‘early adopter user’ tries out the app in the field. Typically, this is either someone in your company who is very good with tech or the complete opposite. Again, it’s then time for some feedback.
Review Feedback and Launch App
We implement any changes based on that, and then the app is launched! If you need training, we can provide it. If you don’t, then you can just crack on with using it.
Faster Fieldwork 28-Day Sprint
Sound like such a reporting process would take months or years to implement? Think again. With our Faster in Four Weeks guarantee, we’ll get your stipulated reporting process up and operational in the field within 28 days, or we’ll refund your setup fee and build your form entirely for free. Because at Rugged Data, we don’t just live by efficiency, we die by efficiency.
Built to be a Partnership
Our processes are based on the principles of Lean Continuous Improvement we’ve touched on, today, and our Rugged Data coaches are constantly looking for bold new ways in which inefficiencies can be mitigated, and processes streamlined. If you’re not happy with the partnership after 90 days, then we’ll offer you a full refund as part of our 90 Day Step Away guarantee. No questions asked.
Want to find out more about how fieldwork can be made smarter and more efficient? Click on this link to get access to our comprehensive ebook on the subject. If you want to see a 30% improvement in efficiency in just four weeks, then you’ll want to read it!
Get in touch now to find out how you can boost your business efficiency.
