Adoption of people engagement practices in continuous improvement programmes: a combined ISO standard-grey system approach

Purpose People engagement is critical to continuous improvement programmes’ performance and success. This study proposes a combined ISO standard-Grey system approach to assess the level of adoption of people engagement practices in continuous improvement programmes. To exemplify the use of this approach, this research analyses the level of adoption of these practices in Brazilian organizations in the manufacturing sector. Design/methodology/approach The combined ISO standard-grey system approach is based on the ISO 10018:2022 standard and two grey system techniques (grey target and grey fixed weight clustering). The exemplification used industry experts from Brazil. Findings The approach developed presents ten people engagement practices in continuous improvement programmes to be assessed. To perform this assessment, a five-linguistic-terms scale is proposed. The exemplification of the approach application for Brazilian reality indicated that the adoption of the analysed practices is at an intermediate level in the country, with possibilities for improvement. Originality/value This research presents in detail an interesting method for assessing the adoption level of people engagement practices in continuous improvement programmes and contributes to debates regarding how these programmes can achieve success, primarily through company employees’ participation and engagement.