Workplace Improvement Team

About the Program

Category: Personnel Management, Employment and Training (Best in Category)

Year: 2013

In 2010 Community Justice Services (CJS) Division of Boulder County identified a need to implement an organizational change model to increase staff engagement and support a high quality workplace environment. The Workplace Improvement Team (WIT) project combines tenets of several organizational change models and has developed and implemented a hybrid model that results in significant organizational upgrades and therefore an improved outcome to customers. Engaged employees help to facilitate satisfied customers, support more effective and creative use of resources, and create better outcomes for customers who utilize an organizations services. Research has linked employee satisfaction to customer satisfaction and also to a company's financial success (“The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement at Northwestern University, November 2004”). Knowing that nearly 60 percent of projects aimed at achieving a change in business practices fail to fully meet their objectives (“IBM Global Study: Majority of Organizational Change Projects Fail”, 2008) an innovative organizational change model was pursued. The WIT project is easily replicable in other organizations, and if implemented with strong leadership, can be just as successful.