How do you foster a culture of continuous improvement in your organization ? Particularly interested in service delivery oriented businesses or organizations.

In regards to fostering a culture, the big thing is asking your team, and specifically your managers to recognize and reward the pattern you are looking to foster. In this case you would want to make sure you regularly highlight situations where your staff has shown the behavior you are looking for (improved a process, or an outcome) and state why it is important, and if possible reward the staff for this behavior.

The other big thing is to continue to talk about it as a goal for the group. The way I always think about it is that you want people to make decisions based on what you are asking of them. If they are faced with a decision that would improve a process or an outcome they should instinctively know that their organization would want them to make that decision because it is important to them.

Casey listed a lot of good tools that you can use to make some of this happen in practice. Teaching people the thoughts behind business process optimization and just general business analysis is also a good idea.

You could also put a small working group of people together to look at a product in your company (i.e the customer experience onboarding into your product, or the bill pay process), and have them review feedback around the process and see if they can improve it.

HTH,

Sven

We leverage the lean six sigma operating model including a balanced scorecard, operating metrics, visual display boards, and gemba rounding to foster and support the culture. Our front-line associates are engaged and participate in the daily management process and are encouraged to leverage tools like 5-whys and A3's to solve problems and improve processes.