As the end of financial year looms for many of us (AskRIGHT included!) there’s a strong sense of closing off one year and preparing to face another. Last month we shared what we learned in 2024 our top line plans for 2025 and what we’re looking forward to. This look back and look forward is something that doesn’t just happen on an annual basis in our team. In fact, once a week we check in with each other to see what’s working and what needs to be addressed. It’s a process that allows us to continually improve our work and ensure we have plans that can be agile and always evolving.
To keep everyone on the same page and empower our teams, it is important to put continuous improvement in place. Our approach is to bring everyone together in a weekly team meet up to follow our four step process outlined below. The best part? Teams who are empowered to deliver and own their areas, course correct quickly when results suggest an intervention is needed, and be focused on team goals and targets.
Making marginal gains
Continuous improvement was refined in the Japanese manufacturing industry and is the approach of making small, continual gains that add up to big goals. It transformed the way the industry worked and became popular outside of manufacturing. The concept broke down improvements into small parts, for instance thinking instead of a wholesale shift, about 1% gains. If I can do this thing 1% better and do so continuously, over time I will increase my gain by 100%. This can be applied to absolutely anything in life, and we find it has a strong place in our planning approach to keep our goals on track.
Find out more about our recommended four steps to building continuous improvement into your team’s work.
Step one – put everyone on the same page, every single week
Compartmentalising a strategy or your work plans can take teams away from accessing the whole picture. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to know everything, but if you are a team responsible for a set of goals, take ownership of them as a team by putting them somewhere visual where everyone can see them. Write out your key team goals and the targets that have been set alongside them to unify the team and focus them against what you are setting out to achieve together.
Check in on your team’s top priorities at least weekly – we suggest an in person weekly meet up (or online if your team works remotely). Start by writing each team member’s top three priorities for that week under one of the overall goals, which will ensure they see how their tasks for that week feed into the big picture plan. This method invites teams to be accountable for overall delivery, as they are all involved in the conversations as to which priorities are helping to achieve which goals. It’s also a great tool for personal development, as it empowers team members to view work across all the team goals and be more agile in supporting on delivery if needed.
“Check in on your team’s top priorities at least weekly, and write team priorities under one of the overall goals to ensure they see how it feeds into the plan.”
It’s important to close the loop on the previous week’s priorities and ensure they were all met. If not, this offers space to understand why: what barriers stood in the way of delivery. There might be an issue looming or have been a shift in organisational plans that made a priority unachievable. By checking in week by week, team priorities are regularly reset and continuous improvement keeps in check the external factors that can affect work taking place.
Step two – are we ok?
A team is only going to be as strong as its people, and yet we so often decouple the two and focus on the work in one forum and the team in another. Every single weekly team meet up to discuss work priorities should start with a people check in. There are lots of ways to do this. A nice, simple way is to use the traffic light system to say if energy is green (good), amber (I’m feeling so so) or red (I’ve had something happen in my day that might cause me to be less productive).
The idea is not to score points or encourage presenteeism (all green, how fantastic!) but to create a safe space and invite honesty. If a team member can say, ‘I’ve had a poor night’s sleep and I don’t feel as if I’m firing on all cylinders today’ and let their colleagues know they’re not feeling100%, it firstly creates space for them to move at a more appropriate pace through their work, and secondly might give a team member who has capacity a heads up so that they can offer support for this person’s priorities.
“The idea is not to score points or encourage presenteeism…but to create a safe space and invite honesty.”
Step three – what’s in our way?
The best way to deal with issues is to call them out as soon as you see them. This is why we encouraged closing the loop on the previous week’s priorities and taking note of anything that caused them not to be delivered in step one. A weekly meet up creates an opportunity for all team issues to be surfaced and categorised. Asking smart questions can help to shrink the issue down into its root cause, which helps define a problem properly. Getting team members to chip in on what might help resolve the issue can invite ideas from across the team to get everyone contributing to help solve the problem.
“Asking smart questions can help to shrink the issue down into its root cause, which helps define a problem properly.”
We recommend assigning a lead to take the next action on dealing with the problem. Keeping this issue listed in the same place as team priorities, so it is seen every time you meet until the resolution is found, keeps focus on solutions whilst it remains a barrier to delivering goals successfully.
Step four – celebrate and grow together
A weekly meet up is not only a chance to look forwards, but also an opportunity to review the week just passed. Some of this is from the continuous learning lens of reflecting on how well priorities were met and any roadblocks that stood in their way, as we discussed in steps one and three.
There is also the opportunity, with the whole team meeting up, to shout out your progress against targets, share successes and celebrate them together. If there are team wide successes, such as campaign results or reaching income targets, this is a great place to discuss them. As mentioned in step one, it can be helpful at the start of a new year when establishing team goals to set out your targets in a place that everyone can see. This could be, for instance, a visual counter of income targets that gets coloured in as the year goes on, or a check list that gets ticked off after delivery. It can be nice if team members have individual successes, to invite these to be shared at your weekly meet up as well.
“There is also the opportunity, with the whole team meeting up, to shout out your progress against targets, share successes and celebrate them together.”
To keep the idea of continuously improving front of mind, it is also recommended to share something you have learned from the week before. This might be from a professional development session or simply something that didn’t work out that way it was planned. Creating a forum to share what hasn’t worked gives teams time to discuss what they might do differently and share those learnings with their colleagues.
With larger teams, simple techniques like having a star of the week can be a nice way to let colleagues show their appreciation for each other and keep the team focused on achieving their important goals together.
Could you try continuous improvement weekly team meetings?
Weekly meet ups that encourage continuous improvement don’t operate alone – they need to be part of a wider plan of regular team meetings, quarterly reviews and annual planning. But they are quick and easy to set up and serve a strong purpose to bring teams together, on the same page, looking at how to achieve goals. It allows leaders to access the knowledge and experience of the entire team when looking at how a plan is taken to market and ultimately, brings a team culture that invites agile working and recognising how goals and priorities can shift over the course of delivery.
Would you like to learn more about setting up a continuous improvement approach in your team? Email us at [email protected] to find out more.