DailyKaizen

I am currently reading about employee engagement - now at historic lows in US businesses (71 % disengaged) and the toll it takes on organizational productivity. In a business like healthcare there is little room to waste employee engagement.
For the last several days, I have been engaged remotely with one of our rapid process improvement teams around the build of a specific tool to measure depression in our clinical information system. The solution from the IT perspective is not straightforward, with lots and twists and turns.
Several people have asked me, “why wasn’t this worked out BEFORE you engaged clinical staff - they just wanted the finished product?” I would ask a different question, a deeper one: “How engaged do we want those who serve our patients to be in solving problems on behalf of the organization?” My answer : very. If we cannot have engagement in the “how” as well as the “what” we do to solve problems, we will continue to keep knowledge within a walled garden and risk disengagement.
With the horrendous state of employee engagement in business today, we can use LEAN to create competitive advantage for our members.
We have not yet gotten the evaluations from this particular RPI, which is a caveat to all of this……