Process change - to you or with you? 18 ideas for engagement

Have you ever been on the receiving end of a process someone else has changed? It can be quite memorable if handled wrong. Something to keep in mind for those of us who are driving process change on a daily basis.  

In process change, there is a world of difference between having something done TO you rather than WITH you. Which way do you think has a better track record of process improvements sticking – changes done to an organization or those done with the organization?

If we involve people in the change effort, they will feel a sense of ownership which is vital to process engagement. When it comes time for a rollout, the audience has a better chance of seeing the changes as “our process” versus “oh yeah – this is the change that Stan down the hall wants...”

With that in mind, it pays to start involving our audience (those impacted by the process change) early and throughout the process evaluation, improvement, design, and rollout stages. Here are 18 ideas people have found to be very useful in involving their audiences:

• Review panels
• Surveys
• Participating in an FMEA
• Kaizen Events
• Helping with data collection
• Helping with an affinity diagram
• Help develop control systems
• Help with a fishbone diagram
• Contests to help name things
• Demos
• Focus groups and interviews
• Participate in process mapping
• Participate in a pilot
• Assist in a DOE
• Help with a force field analysis
• Review and input on key user documents
• Hey with a 5-Whys exercise
• Have them write reviews / testimonials

Plus, you can add your own tried-and-true favorites as well. So, while it may be tempting at times to use brute-force implementation to shove a process change down the organization’s throat, perhaps we’ll get better long-term performance by sprinkling in a few involvement tactics along the way.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get involved in a nice steak coming off my backyard grill.

Happy change!