Article 97. Getting Innovation by Changing Organization Culture
Innovation in most organizations is generally thought to occur only at the upper management level resulting in major changes in the way a process is done involving a considerable investment. Lower level employee input is left to suggestion systems which does get some good ideas from a few employees but generally the system does not work well because most employees are given little responsibility for making improvements to the organizations processes.
Establishing a culture of employee innovation is one of the best ways to get an efficient operation with continuous improvement. Because the employee is close to the day to day operation he can detect problems sooner and has the opportunity to come up with an innovative solution before the problem is even known to management. However in most bureaucratic organizations it’s difficult to get employees to innovate on their jobs. For three reasons employees are generally not asked to be innovative and are intimidated by the culture of the organization. The second reason is if they do have a good idea it is generally ignored due to the competitive nature found at the work place. And the third reason is little or no responsibility is delegated to the employee for making improvements to the work processes.
This problem was solved by many industrial companies in the early 1980’s by the implementation of various Japanese quality programs such as “Quality of Work Life”, “Work Improvement Teams” and “Total Quality Management”. Each of these programs organized the work force into Teams who met generally once a week to discuss how improvements could be made in the job processes. The idea is to change the culture of the organization into one where continuous improvement will be the accepted norm.
Many of my articles are on the above subject of cultural change through government reform. To eliminate a haphazard approach from reading selected articles I have organized my articles into a logical sequence adding some new material into my Books.
INNOVATION IN GOVERNMENT
A GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING AND USING INNOVATION
IN GOVERNMENT REFORM
by Lawrence Rosier
TEN STEPS TO JUMPSTARTING GOVERNMENT REFORM
A GUIDE TO MANAGING THE REFORM PROCESS
by Lawrence Rosier
