Article 47. Changing the Workplace Environment to get Innovation.
The primary purpose of Work Improvement Teams (WIT) is to focus all the brainpower at the work place on innovation. In a competitive environment innovation is where you save the business and the employees’ jobs. In many government bureaucracies void of competition innovation is not only unwelcome it is discouraged. Actually there is a kind of government competition but it is within the state where agencies compete for tax dollars. This is where bureaucracies hide their wastefulness while making blotted requests for increased funding. The situation here is that any innovation shown by one organization simply feeds more funds to those organizations that don’t innovate.
The problem is how to change the workplace environment across all state government agencies at the same time and yet keep the changes small enough to avoid a major failure and political embarrassment. I recommend that the governor implement a WIT test team in a workplace environment where success is most likely. When the WIT test implementation is successful he should then form a WIT Implementation Task Force for statewide implementation of WIT’s. Each agency head must support the implementation within his organization failure to do this will lead to the failure of the WIT. The governor’s WIT Implementation Task Force will travel throughout the state visiting each WIT and report weekly on the progress of statewide WITs. Successes should be published in the state’s newsletter showing support from the governor’s office. Total change comes in small successful steps the first of which is with the implementation of WITs.
Besides the innovation at the workplace there is also personal innovation aimed at reinventing oneself. State government leaders should be encouraged to attend seminars on this subject. I only mention this as a possible way of softening the implementation of the WITs and preventing the appearance that they are being crammed down managements throats. For detailed information about the implementation of WITs see Article 11. “Adaptation of Manufacturing Quality Improvement Techniques to Achieve Efficient Government”.
