How can your people work more efficiently and effectively? How do you encourage pro-activeness, and how do you turn a culture of fire-fighting into one of fire prevention? The focus of many operational excellence projects is frequently on tools and processes. At Gwynt, however, we put more emphasis on changing the mindset of the organisation.

We have developed six principles, taken from the lean philosophy, to create a basis for a Culture of Excellence. Clients that have embedded a Culture of Excellence into their organisation demonstrate excellent operations and a culture of continuous improvement.

Which of the six principles to implement in an organisation differs per company and sector. Our consultants use their considerable market and business knowledge to decide which solutions are most appropriate.

Our six principles are:

To know your position, you need to establish specific goals at every level in the organisation. Moreover, it’s vital that everyone in the organisation knows if you’re achieving your goals or not. They need to be able to ask themselves what they can do to help the business achieve its goals. We’ll help you translate your strategy into concrete goals at every level by establishing major KPIs and effective action plans. Just as importantly, we’ll help you create ownership and pro-activeness among your employees.

If there are no standards, how can you improve? Uniformity and standardisation in the implementation of activities are the basis of reliable results and sustainable improvement. Standards give your managers and employees the time and space to create and improve, but you need clear agreements about roles, responsibilities and standard working methods. We can provide support you in all these areas in a very hands-on way. We can guide managers and team leaders on the shop floor by showing them how to develop, monitor and update your standards.

A typical feature of operational processes is everyone being busy the whole day. But what would their answer be if they asked themselves: ‘Are we actually doing the right things?’ The right things are activities that ultimately add value for the customer. We’ll help you identify that customer value and show you how to spot and eliminate waste to increase customer value.

Co-operators make all the difference. Working together results in a better performance for the customers. Teamwork and collaboration can be directed through goal-orientated improvement discussions, so we offer several tools to improve co-operation: our ‘effective meeting’ assessment, guidelines for targeted and decisive meetings, SCRUM and STOER assessment for measuring behaviour in the organisation.

At the end of the day, everything revolves around skilled and motivated people. It is important that the right people are in the right place and that investment is made in developing your human capital. The transition from reactive to proactive behaviour is key. Taking ownership and using your initiative to improve instead of the simply carrying out tasks.

We can help you identify roles and responsibilities, draw up job descriptions and determine interventions on behaviour and skills. We can train managers in implementing their management roles and developing their leadership qualities. Tailored motivation and activity programmes that increase motivation are also available.  These programmes are based on gamification principles (applying game-design elements in non-game contexts).

From fire-fighting to continuous improvement. Don’t settle for ingrained habits. Look for opportunities to improve and innovate. We encourage continuous improvement by making or keeping people curious, by understanding the problem behind the problem, and by showing them how they can see and do things differently from a perspective of objectivity. Interventions and training in attitude and behaviour (leading by example) lead to continuous improvement becoming the gold standard.