Want to embed continuous improvement, increase staff morale and retention? You need to GROSS.

Are you looking for a way to embed continuous improvement in your organisation at the same time as increasing staff morale and retention rates? If you answered yes, have you heard about GROSS?

GROSS stands for Get Rid of Stupid Stuff. Believed to have originated in Singapore General Hospital, it centres around recognising and responding to those seemingly small but ‘stupid’ issues that frustrate your employees – the niggles that leaders may not even be aware of but impact your team’s day-to-day efficiency and/or wellbeing, such as:

• A process or way of working that was effective when it was created but hasn’t evolved as staff and work practices have moved on.
• A recurring team meeting that always runs on too long or covers topics that aren’t relevant to all participants.
• Always (or never) being copied into emails, regardless of their relevance.

In isolation, these issues seem minor. However, if they’re not addressed, they can quickly add up, creating inefficiencies across your organisation and leading to staff becoming frustrated, disengaged and, ultimately, impacting on your staff retention rates and productivity.

The purpose of GROSS is to open up conversations with your employees as part of everyday work, so you can surface emerging issues while they’re still relatively small and rapidly take action to ‘get rid of stupid stuff’ before a minor irritation snowballs into a larger issue.

How can we use GROSS in our organisation?

GROSS is essentially built around asking: what are we doing that could be done better with some simple tweaks? Can we talk about it and understand if there is anything we can do to change it?

We’ve broken this down into five steps, to help you put the idea into practice.

Important note: This is not about setting up new cumbersome procedures. The focus of GROSS is making fast, rapid micro-improvements part of your everyday work – meaning that it’s really important to make it as quick and straightforward as possible. Much of what we’ve set out below could be covered during a 5-10 minute segment of an existing team meeting.

Step 1: Find out what can be improved

The starting point for GROSS is holding conversations with employees about what they feel needs to be changed or could be improved.

How you conduct these conversations will depend on the size and structure of your organisation – but make it as quick and easy as possible. The focus is on generating feedback fast, not setting up new cumbersome procedures. For example, you might:

• Ringfence time at company meetings for employees to shout out their ideas.
• Have weekly coffee and catch-up sessions where staff can pop in for informal chats.
• Use an employee engagement platform for employees to start conversations and share their ideas at any time.
  Initiate discussions via staff-led forums.

The critical point is that you ask your employees what matters most to them right now, give them a safe space to raise their issues and listen to their responses.

Step 2: Prioritise ideas

The next step is to rapidly evaluate and prioritise the points raised, so you can feel confident that you know (rather than assume) what matters most to your employees.

Again, focus on making it as fast and straightforward as possible. Examples of approaches that we’ve seen working effectively include:

• Automating the process using an employee engagement platform that collates and prioritises the most impactful conversations and suggestions.
• Creating a weekly / monthly online poll of ideas put forward.

Step 3: Implement fast, impactful changes

Once you’ve identified the top priorities for your employees, it’s time to engage on progressing towards improvements and solutions.

Clearly the solutions will vary depending on the issues that have been prioritised. However, we recommend you:

• Involve your employees in finding solutions: they’re the ones closest to the issues and will know what will and won’t work – again this can be via existing meetings or new groupings to engage individuals across teams and levels.
• Focus on quick wins that you can implement fast, rather than getting too caught in developing ‘perfect’ responses.
• Aim for small, fast and impactful changes, which could be as simple as revising the time, structure or attendees of a meeting, to make it work more effectively.

Step 4: Feedback

Feeding back on the actions you’ve taken (and just as importantly, actions that you are perhaps unable to take right now) is an essential part of the process. It demonstrates to your staff that their voices are valued and helps build up their sense of belonging in the workplace.

To ensure this part of the process is as valuable as possible:

• Update staff promptly and regularly on the actions you’re taking (or unable to take right now), while ideas are still fresh.
• Look at feedback as a two-way conversation with your employees, where you’re working together to find solutions, not being presented with a list of ‘wants’ that you might struggle to address.
• Don’t ignore an idea if you can’t fix it right now – explaining why you can’t take it forward can be as powerful a way of engaging staff as actually finding a solution.

Step 5: Repeat

It’s really important that you don’t see GROSS as a one-off activity. Its real benefit comes through the regular frequency and cumulative impact of numerous small, fast improvements as the activity is repeated time and again within your organisation.

To help encourage open conversations:

• Be clear about when and how frequently you will be asking for and responding to points and stick to it – regular and consistent is far more effective than a bundle of activity followed by a long period of silence.
• Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see an immediate step-change in workforce morale or effectiveness – when staff see their points taken seriously and changes put in place, their trust and morale will grow.
• Focus on quick wins initially, so staff can see their ideas lead to action. This can help to overcome any initial reluctance to put forward points, leading to more open conversations about other improvements that can support your workforce’s wellbeing and efficiency.

Does GROSS really work?

Here at Trickle, we’ve seen numerous instances of organisations using the GROSS approach of rapid small improvements to improve productivity and staff morale.

To give just one example, one healthcare organisation we work with told us about a doctor who was incredibly frustrated with the 30-minute wait they (and their patients) experienced each time they carried out a common diagnostic test.

Rather than feeling that they could not challenge the status quo, the doctor raised this as an idea via the Trickle platform. Trickle highlighted to senior leadership that many colleagues felt the same frustration, and following discussion with staff within the Trickle platform, a workaround was created within seven weeks. Today, the results from this test are produced in near real-time.

This seemingly minor change helped build trust in the approach, improved morale and also enabled doctors to do more with their available time – in turn helping to improve patient outcomes. In addition, this change saved this organisation an estimated £25,000 in time saved.

What is even more remarkable is that this saving arose from just one of more than 180 employee-led conversations that team had that year. While not every solution reached made such a financially quantifiable outcome, they each added to the cumulative impact on staff morale, engagement and retention.

Make your organisation GROSS

One of the huge benefits of GROSS is that it’s not about full-scale organisational transformations that require long lead times, teams of consultants and huge levels of time and resource.

Rather, GROSS focuses on rapid micro-improvements – with its real value often coming from giving staff an opportunity to talk about what matters most to them, showing that you’re listening and then talking to them about what could happen next.

You don’t need a budget to open up conversations and implement micro-transformations. You simply need to encourage your employees to get comfortable with saying: let’s talk about the stupid stuff that we’re doing and see how we can make it better. Start doing that and you might be surprised at how quickly continuous improvement becomes the norm.

Paul Reid, CEO & Founder of Trickle, recently discussed the concept of GROSS with Lucia Knight at the 2024 Joy of Work Summit. Click here to listen to the 10 minute interview.