Great things can happen when an organization has a strong culture of service excellence and a commitment to accountability. The City has adopted a continuous improvement mindset to bring teams across our organization to collaborate and problem-solve, working together to help make Guelph future-ready.
Since the organization began offering an introduction to continuous improvement orientation course in March 2021, nearly 650 employees have taken part, and more continue to embrace the continuous improvement mindset year after year. This is building solid foundations within the City to identify and tackle opportunities to support greater efficiencies or process improvements.
In 2022, the Continuous Improvement Office launched the first Lean Green Belt (LGB) Program wave, with eight newly certified Green Belts tackling projects. Lean Green Belt projects improve processes by using root cause analysis and data-driven decisions to guide efforts that target, implement and assess solutions with the largest opportunity for impact on users.
Our first round of Green Belts participants has greatly improved our organizational processes, leading to better customer service and improved employee experience. These projects include improved business continuity planning, policies, and processes; reductions in material set to the landfill with more being recycled ad reused; a shift in solid waste-related calls to ServiceGuelph to improve first-call resolution and reduce wait times for many services; reductions in Park’s related customer service; the development of a customer satisfaction measurement framework and more.
Continuous improvement is not only the pursuit of making things better; celebrating wins and highlighting meaningful learning is also an integral part of our continuous improvement journey at the City, helping us provide better service to our community.
