Continuous Employee Improvement Programs are Often Overlooked, But are Absolutely Critical to Succes in Today’s Best Practice Enterprises

Continuous Employee Improvement (CEI) is an important business fundamental within the Best Practices Enterprise™ philosophy. It addresses staff development and measurement. In a nutshell, a well structured CEI program prepares employees to deliver expected results, tracks performance against those expected results and rewards personnel when excellence is achieved.

Current corporate training and performance measurement paradigms seldom work that way. Most are not integrated and place emphasis only on training and measuring on a work step basis.
At best, these kinds of approaches offer only incremental improvement opportunities. It seems that many programs, in fact, have lost sight of the overall business results being sought by the organizations that have implemented them.

CEI, on the other hand, brings training and work measurement activities together; integrating them into a mutually dependent whole aimed at changing behaviors and improving business performance.

Setting a CEI program into motion is a multi-faceted effort that uses tools like performance measurement, rewards and incentives, recruiting and retention and training and education to improve staff performance. Long-term CEI program achievement depends on several factors including:

· Linking the program to an organization’s mission, vision and values so that CEI becomes an essential cultural element of the concern;

· Gaining management commitment to provide the thought leadership needed to make the CEI effort vital and important to the business;

· Allowing the time required to properly plan the CEI implementation effort in order to ensure that the work requisite to continually improve staff is done efficiently and effectively, and;

· Weaving CEI into the hiring and review process to make certain that the effort endures.

To close, lasting Continuous Employee Improvement program success is about changing the way in which management thinks about workers, workers think about work and the ways in which we motivate them both to change behaviors for the good of the Best Practices Enterprise™.

Remember, when you’re ready to pursue CEI, call on the Best Practices Enterprise Group to help you gain a perspective on this important business fundamental.