When I was studying in the 1990s, the concept of quality circles appeared to be all the rage. A group of people getting together to tackle quality issues that were plaguing the business.

As time moved on, different names for this kind of meeting appeared. Continuous improvement task forces. Kaizen teams. Task and finish groups. You get the idea.

The key principle is, however, that some people get together on a regular basis to look at improvement.

Keep it simple

A good continuous improvement meeting should have:

You don’t need to make it any more complicated than this.

From good to better

So, what would make a continuous improvement meeting better?

Here are two points:

  1. A focus that relates to strategic objectives.
  2. * A team that complement each other, to achieve the improvements required.

Taking point one. You can just meet up and see what naturally flows from the conversations. This is a good way to start as there will no doubt be a number of issues that affect the day to day running of the business. In fact, these kinds of issue will be a feature for the life of the team but possibly not the primary focus after a while.

Regarding point two, the team can flex and change. At some points you will want a cross section of staff to provide different points of view. At other times you may want a more similar group to focus on a specific improvement. Knowing what each improvement needs to get it over the line is important.

Real life continuous improvement meetings

One of my consulting clients used to struggle to get away from their day to day crises. A conversation early one morning with an unhappy senior member of the team identified a handful of improvements that the business agreed would make things better.

An outline plan was drawn up and a few members of the team met once a fortnight to nudge these improvements along. As progress started to be made, other ideas and opportunities started to be shared.

Before long, other people joined this regular meeting to support and take actions away. Within a few months the original problems had been dealt with. Within a year the team had transformed the way that they operated large parts of their business.

None of this was rocket science. They met regularly and tackled problems in a (fairly!) controlled way.

Periodically they reset their list of priorities, with the support from company leaders. The team seem to enjoy the continuous improvement meetings and the results spoke for themselves.

Ideas for continuous improvement meetings

Hopefully this article has given you some ideas on running continuous improvement meetings, if you don’t already do something similar.

If you want some ideas to help you shape and form your meetings, then download a copy of my free guide:

Enjoy running your meetings and feel free to reach out and share your team’s success stories with me.


Giles
Giles

Giles Johnston is a Chartered Engineer who has focused his career on continuous improvement and delivering continuous improvement projects for a wide range of businesses.