HVN member Christie Clinic cited in new study on employee engagement

Gopesh Anand and Dilip Chhajed, are professors of business administration at Illinois.

"The research, co-written with Luis Delfin, a former graduate student, advances three arguments on how employees’ commitment to continuous improvement in the workplace can be enhanced:

• The day-to-day work environment needs to be perceived by employees as autonomous.
• As continuous improvement involves making changes to the very practices that frontline employees use in their day-to-day work, trust in leadership is critical.
• A higher degree of trust in leadership further leads to proactive behaviors by frontline employees, encouraging them to use the autonomy in their day-to-day jobs to seek out and make systematic improvements to work practices.

The researchers tested their hypotheses on data collected from individual employees working for Christie Clinic, an outpatient health care organization based in Champaign, Ill., that has actively engaged in continuous improvement based on lean management principles over the last six years."

This research is quite consistent with what I observe in great lean companies. If you are implementing lean successfully quality improves, costs go down and staff engagement goes up.

Read the story here: http://news.illinois.edu/news/12/1114improvementinitiatives_GopeshAnand.html