| rxwine Member since: Oct 24, 2012
Threads: 189
Posts: 18800 | There's a reason Toyota doesn't need labor unions. They don't resemble in the slightest the companies that Unions fought against. Because the be all end all of profit has always been a failure. At least until there are only machines left working it will continue to be. Human workers can't be used as just cogs in a machine. That's why Unions came into being. Quote: Aside from its TPS, the Toyota Way is also being vaunted as one of the main drivers for its success. But what is the Toyota way?
According to Toyota, its philosophy regarding its employees is to “to realize management that shows respect for people and build stable labour-management relations based on mutual trust and mutual respect, as well as to have all employees exercise their abilities to think, be creative, and utilize their strengths to the maximum extent possible.”
Learning from their mistakes during the 1950s and its subsequent strikes, Toyota came up with a way to never lose employees in such droves and in such bad conditions ever again, thus the Toyota way was born. The Toyota way is founded on two main tenets which are:
Continuous Improvement
Respect for people
If you would notice, the Toyota way also includes their TPS, since their Kaizen method is rooted on steady optimization throughout its entire lifecycle.
The Toyota Way stands on the following principles:
Safety and Health
Human Resource development
Diversity and Inclusion
Pride and Loyalty
One of the great things about Toyota is that it puts its money where its mouth is. These aren’t just nice words that employees like to look at on the company wall. Toyota expects top-level performance from its workers all the time—so they deliver great benefits, engagement opportunities and an inclusive and safe work environment in return for all their hard work.
toyo
Photo by: Steve Jurvetson
So how do these principles translate to actual tools, strategies and actions that have made Toyota number one? Let’s look at the Toyota Way in action:
•Keeping employees aware all the time.
A lot of companies opt to ‘keep secrets’ from their staff and workers so that the latter can focus on their work. Instead of ‘protecting’ their employees through secrecy, Toyota opts to disclose everything that affects their workers so the latter are able to make the best decisions at work. A case in point was when the company required everyone to wear hard hats as long as they worked in a plant—whether they were on the assembly line or not. Toyota provided information about accidents that necessitated the hard hat requirement, even if they knew it might scare their employees.
•Valuing diversity and constructive differences.
Toyota attributes its success to the diverse workforce it employs. According to their annual sustainability report, they have plants in Brazil, Russia, China, the US and Japan that enjoy year-round exchange programs to improve on each other’s best practices. They are proud of their small growth in female workers every year—and are candid and open about how the women are still a small (14%) share in their workforce. They said that they are working on it, though.
•Providing employees with work-life balance advantages.
While Toyota wants to minimize absenteeism, it offers workers leave facilities and other life advantages that work with the company instead of against it. Whereas stricter companies may want to reduce absenteeism through disapproving leaves, Toyota makes its workers feel free to take sanctioned time for the family and to be open with personal obligations. This promotes an environment of support and an emphasis of personal relationships beyond work boundaries. In 2012, Toyota has seen a rise in both males and females taking nursing and child care leaves after it released a guideline for childcare and nursing.
•Creating clubs and groups for intersecting hobbies, backgrounds, interests and others.
In a further bid to widen employee communication and personal relationships between staff, Toyota offers their employees chances to join company-funded clubs and groups within the office. Using their own social networks that are accessible to everyone in the company, this creates more avenues for ‘mind-sharing’ and loyalty between employees across levels both horizontally and vertically. Using technology, they have their own proprietary employee management software and system that encourages collaboration, discussion and a culture of inclusion in social groups.
•Constant feedback and scheduled evaluation and assessment.
One of the benchmarks of employee engagement is regular feedback. At Toyota, each quarter production employees attend a directors’ address between shifts. These are followed by employee focus groups, established to ensure the intended message has been effectively understood. Employees are encouraged to raise any questions they may have to their supervisor or manager in the first instance, or via email to a mailbox established specifically for employee feedback and questions. Their employee management system also provides 24/7 mechanisms for acquiring data on their employees and managers.
•Being able to ‘push back’ against executives.
Some studies and company interviews have shown that constructive criticism coming from subordinates is acceptable in Toyota. Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota’s president, said that as he rose to the top, he constantly challenged how things were done—which meant he challenged his superiors a lot. Executives are expected to deal with criticism constructively and to listen to their staff more often with concrete responses. According to executives and employees at Toyota, it’s encouraged that you ‘pick a friendly fight’. The head of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Yukitoshi Funo, said in a report, “Before I was sent to the U.S. in 1997 [as senior vice president], I made the rounds of several top executives in Japan. They told me to increase the number of sales outlets. These were executive vice presidents and managing directors. I went to the market to see the situation. Increasing the number of dealerships would have caused more intense competition and threatened proper management of dealerships. I decided to ignore everything those top executives told me.”
•Valuing training and development—especially for managers.
Most of the time, companies train their employees on new trends and the latest technologies for their industry. At Toyota, management training gets the spotlight. The company’s training areas focus primarily on leadership and being able to produce managers that inspire loyalty, innovation and constant improvement from their employees. Every employee receives at least 6.8 hours of training within the year. This training not only covers soft skills and non-cognitive skills that are the signs of engaged employees but also the company’s story as told by its executives. Only loyal, long-time employees can tell the whole story of the company and teach how things are done the Toyota way. With this kind of adult pedagogy, Toyota hits a lot of pain points that most HR departments struggle with: loyalty, passion, inclusion and employee orientation.
•Using teamwork and collaboration as a guiding principle instead of just a buzzword.
While a lot of companies want to say that it values teamwork, it’s ultimately up to the manager how effectively teamwork is used or if it even happens. The company values managers that do work in teams well—and they know exactly how to test this. New employees are given chances to make decisions based on a general set of guiding principles. This forces managers to exert extra effort in collaborating and developing relationships and trust with their staff. When a problem arises, each member of the team is accountable and has the authority and responsibility to find a solution. The practice started on the factory floor and has spread throughout the corporation.
•They start with the employee orientation.
At Toyota, where constant improvement is a guiding principle, their employee engagement process starts with the orientation. According to their 2014 sustainability report, employees have to understand the Toyota Way from the very start:
•The history, foundation and application of the Toyota Way
•Ensuring continuous improvement in employee’s daily work by applying the principles of Plan Do Check Act;
•Building consensus through effective report writing; and
•Identifying and solving simple and complex problems
•Using Genchi Genbutsu as a standard for knowledge and position.
In the culture of collaboration and diversity that Toyota is trying to maintain, Genchi Genbutsu or “Have you seen it yourself?” is one of the main questions that managers are always taught to ask themselves. This is why superiors and executives always have to get on-the-job training with specific Toyota plan processes and frontline procedures before they can make any decision or handle a team. If the executive does not understand how the production line is moving, how can he or she make any good decisions about it?
•Taking on a supportive, capability-building role for their employees.
While you can strive to hire the best people all the time, underperformers cannot be weeded out until you actually find out that they are inefficient. Instead of asking the employee to leave, they try to uplift the individual by building his or her capabilities through training or finding a better-suited position. Sometimes, the problematic worker is enrolled in a mentorship program. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, for instance, Toyota’s Thailand operation weathered four straight years of losses with no job cuts. The order had come down from then president Hiroshi Okuda: “Cut all costs, but don’t touch any people.” While this may go against Lean principles (which Toyota adheres to strictly when it comes to their assembly line), the company has never forgotten the 1950s where it almost went bankrupt and had to lose more than half its workers. Clearly, Toyota has vowed to avoid this—and it has succeeded, so far.
•The office is structured without partitions.
How can you collaborate with physical boundaries present? Even if you do have ‘meeting rooms’ and ‘conference halls’, the barriers go back up once you step out. To eliminate both physical and interpersonal barriers, Toyota doesn’t put people in cubicles. This does not only save them money (since office space is expensive in Japan) but it also forces their workers to talk more and work in teams more closely. Accountability is easy to uphold since everyone knows what everyone else is doing with just one look.
•Always do things face-to-face
Memos are important in Toyota mostly for documentation. But with the memo always comes a face-to-face meeting with executives and vice presidents. Open communication is one of the highest priorities in Toyota which is why plant directors go down and interact with the assembly line workers. With dealerships, directors and other executives are always on the move, disseminating information. To Toyota, the expense for face-to-face meetings is easier to foot than the losses incurred from miscommunication.
In the end, Toyota has become number one through a myriad of ways that contribute to an overarching culture of constant improvement in anything and everything along with an abiding respect for everyone in the company. While this creates so many contradictions, the small practices and details that occur within the company make up more than the whole.
http://www.masskom.com/blog/how-toyotas-people-made-it-number-one-an-employee-engagement-story/ You believe in an invisible god, and dismiss people who say they are trans? Really? |
