Exploiting employees’ potentialities for Continuous Improvement Programs

Continuous Improvement (CI) consists in the ongoing and never-ending research of improvements area, pursuing incremental changings over time. Usually, incremental improvements do not require many competences to be carried out, and so even employees with low experience can conduct CI changings if well guided and trained with a strong methodology. However, most of companies devote few resources to CI Programs (CIP), relying mainly on experienced employees to directly conduct CIP instead of taking advantage of them only to counsel and guide junior resources. This paper shows that even not experienced people in a company can bring significant improvements if they are well trained and if they use a defined and structured method. This statement has been tested in more than 40 companies. The results demonstrate that, on one hand, guided junior resources can bring valuable improvements to the company, and on the other hand this approach enlarges the number of improvement actions that a company can undertake, thus strongly improve the impact of CIP. Moreover, involving inexperienced employees in CIP increases not only confidence and commitment on their job but also, at the end, their satisfaction.