Yammer groups and communities are a powerful way to manage continuous improvement initiatives in your organisation. Quality and continuous improvement work requires distributed advocates, customer insights, problem solving and adaptive change. Yammer delivers the capability to bring your employees together in one platform for these important and valuable conversations.
Connect Your Continuous Improvement Champions
A powerful place to start is to bring together your continuous improvement experts and champions in a community of practice to share information, insights, expertise and learning. Given the many kinds and models of continuous improvement, even this discipline can become siloed around techniques, philosophies and even jargon. Everyone working on making the organisation better can connect and understand each other’s work, whether they call what they do Lean, Agile, Product, Kaizen, Quality, Continuous Improvement, Productivity or some other term of art. Having this community of practice work out loud together connects your continuous improvement employees and initiatives and makes them discoverable by the wider business. Both members of the community and the wider organisation can learn the approaches in use, how problems get solved and how change happens to benefit the whole organisation.
Share Customer Insights: Value, Pain points, Issues, Broken Processes and Escalations
Continuous improvement work needs to be guided by customer insights and feedback from employees. It can often be hard and costly to gather this on a project by project basis. Yammer groups dedicated to key customers, lines of business or process can be a place to gather continuous feedback from customers leveraging the interactions of employees across the breadth of the organisation. Frontline staff are a key source of insights but often don’t know where to find the process owners or those who can help address issues. Give them a group to share those issues. Operations employees are another key source of lessons on processes and products needing improvement. Help them to connect with the right people to address their issues.
Solve Problems Together
Your quality and continuous improvement advocates can leverage Yammer to work directly with employees involved in the work to solve the problems identified. They can also leverage Yammer for ideation with the input of the wider organisation and to draw in expertise as required from a range of people across the organisation, both known and unknown. Yammer is a powerful coordinator of an organisations talents and capabilities to fulfil strategic goals and to facilitate adaptation.
Create Sustainable Improvement & Change
Embedding quality and continuous improvement initiatives in the organisation requires ongoing change management. That change begins with people understanding the initiatives early, being engaged in their development and having ongoing ownership and advocacy of the initiative beyond its life as project. Finding advocates for your change initiative through Yammer, engaging them and them empowering them to continue the change is a key benefit to your continuous improvement initiative
The goal of all continuous improvement work in your organisation is to create greater value for employees, for customers and for the organisation. Yammer groups and communities are a great way to connect the whole organisation around that important strategic work.
