Sustaining Value Creation addresses the critical ingredient for sustaining attention on process improvement by actively engaging the organization in a disciplined approach that drives accountability and culture change. It is very important to take the time to ask employees for their ideas and acting upon them to make the changes required. It is important to hold regular meetings to gather and respond to workers' questions, and suggestions. This will enable organizations to improve their processes for the long-term.
Therefore, whether improvement sticks depends on what else is competing for the organization's scarce time. It is important that organizations develop a culture that believes in spending time on nurturing process improvement. It is important that organizations were created in silos and managers were raised as individual contributors, where they added-value by solving problems themselves. Most stood out by doing things better and faster than their peers, commanding and controlling, not by coaching and helping others to solve problems.
The natural tendency in the long-term is for improvement activities to erode due to the day-to-day pressures for delivering work or putting out the many day-to-day fires. It is important to maintain focus on the savings and efficiencies that the improvements provide. Front-line improvement activities can be rejuvenated by mechanisms that encourage managers to carve out time to engage workers about process improvements. There are many effective mechanisms to enable sustainable process improvement such as operational analytics and performance scoreboards that track daily results, daily work meetings to discuss improvement targets and obstacles are proven means to drive culture change.