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Ask your employees who or what is holding them up. Ask a healthy sampling of company employees every few months what department or position holds them up from doing their job? You might also ask who or what seems to be detrimental to the overall health of the company?
Do not sway opinions by biased questions; keep your questions general and vague and nonjudgmental. Keep all comments confidential and private and evaluate them from a procedural or process problem viewpoint. Remember that some departments will always be irritating to others (i.e. Quality control will reject parts before shipment for the good of the company and customer relations, safety personnel who will rightfully shut down a dangerous machine operating without the proper guard rather than cut off the hand of an employee, collections personnel will put a company on hold for future shipments due to non-payment of past due accounts receivable invoices).
Ask numerous employees and watch for trends to emerge. Look for trends and opportunities to streamline the firm from your employees’ comments. They may complain, but they do normally want to do a good job and they are bothered personally by bottlenecks in the system. Listen to them when they tell you there are pinch points that can be eliminated by adding more people, replacing incompetent with experienced personnel, adding capital, encouraging better and more extensive training or redefining processes currently misunderstood or not defined at all.
Get ready for bad comments about your management staff; poor leadership is more normal than you think. You need to encourage comments also that you may not want to hear concerning bad behavior of your supervisors. You need to know if employees are instructed to keep quiet about situations that they know are wrong or against company policies. This is the main reason why comments must be kept confidential and anonymous.
Once you fix the first problem, there will be another to emerge. Remember that once this troublesome employee or department is eliminated or fixed, another bottleneck will be exposed. All of them are there creating problems but some are just not as noticeable as the worst ones causing the most havoc. You are going to go down the list and eliminate each to improve the company.
The primary benefit in asking questions is ultimately increased net profit. The great benefit you get from all of this is satisfied employees who see that you listen to them. This is more valuable than you can imagine. You also eliminate problems each day and this has a very positive affect long term on the bottom line if consistently followed.
