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Challenges in Agile Adoption

Kaizen Culture in the Workplace

The improvement in the business
The improvement in the business

Kaizen is a system that requires interaction and participation from all employees, from the front-line crew to upper management and even the company’s CEO.

Everyone is encouraged to brainstorm and come up with suggestions for improvement regularly. It is a continuous activity carried out throughout the year. Employees from all company levels work together proactively to achieve continuous, small, and incremental improvements to the business processes. This way, different experience levels and skills can be combined to create potent techniques for improving the company’s processes.  Kaizen is a process that, if performed correctly, humanizes the workplace, eliminates hard work while encouraging brilliant jobs, and motivates people to conduct experiments based on their suggestions and learn to identify and reduce waste in the business processes. Implementing Kaizen as an action plan through a series of Kaizen events teaches employees to think differently about their work. They are pushed to think about how their work can be further improved to achieve tremendous success.

Implementing Kaizen in the workplace

There are three stages in the implementation of Kaizen in any organization:

  • Encourage participation – To ensure the active involvement of all employees, awareness about Kaizen must be created. After the necessary awareness training sessions are provided, conduct and promote Kaizen events and reward employees for successfully implementing ideas, which are the results of these events. In such events, the direct involvement of management is also
    important.
  • Training and Education—Proper training is required for executives to learn the essence of Kaizen. The management level should thoroughly understand Kaizen in an organizational vision context, which needs to be followed vigorously to achieve the desired business results. They must also be taught how to be impartial towards everyone and encourage their employees to participate actively.
  • Quality level improvement—After training is completed, people should remain focused on making changes toward improvement. They should take measures to start making small and incremental changes toward achieving long-term goals, like improving efficiency, processes, and quality.

In organizations where Kaizen is being implemented, transparency between different levels of the organization is very crucial. Effective communication should take place between all levels of employees.

While employees are brainstorming for ideas, it is essential that management also gets involved in these sessions. The manager should also ensure that their suggestions and ideas are acted upon immediately and not delayed by a week or month.

Employees should be informed about other activities in the team and how their ideas are being worked upon. People should not feel that their ideas have all gone to waste and are not being used. A positive mindset will help keep Kaizen alive in the organization.

Thus, the constant application of Kaizen creates huge long-term value by developing the culture that is needed for genuine continuous improvement.

Kaizen’s five primary elements

Kaizen is founded upon five primary elements:

  • Quality Circles: A quality circle is a group of people who work on the same or similar project and meet regularly to identify, analyze, and solve work‐related issues.
  • Improved Morale: It is an essential step in achieving long-term efficiency and productivity.
  • Teamwork: Kaizen strives to help employees see that they are all part of a team and need to work together to succeed.
  • Personal Discipline: Employees’ commitment to personal discipline ensures that the team remains strong.
  • Suggestions for Improvement: Gathering feedback from all employees ensures that all problems are addressed before they become significant.

What about your workplace?  Are you continuously improving?  Are you embracing Kaizen?

Chris

 

 

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Challenges in Agile Adoption

8 Ways Leaders Pull the Team through Tough Times

It’s easy to be a leader when things are going well. It can be downright awesome—especially if you get your castle or palace (this may not apply to the typical shift manager).
But when your team is in the trenches under fire, you need some serious leadership skills to hold it all together.
1. Grit: Grit is defined as courage, resolve, and strength of character, but the final blend of those characteristics yields a quality perhaps best summarized by one word: toughness. Good leaders hold the team together in tough times by staying committed to the battle.
2. Optimism: While grit mainly relates to the present, optimism is a component of leadership that looks to the future. A leader with a positive view of the outcome creates a mental framework for the team to pull through because they foster the belief that something great is on the other side.
3. Pragmatism: While leaders need to be gritty and optimistic, they also need to be practical, using intelligence and common sense to navigate the given situation. Having rose-colored glasses for the future is great, but having them on as you look at the present can lead to costly mistakes.
4. Selflessness. A bad leader will try to save their skin, but a good captain goes down with the ship—because he makes sure crewmembers get off first (that said, he doesn’t necessarily have to go down with the ship).
5. Resolution. Tough times are ripe for dissent and mutiny, but a good leader holds command. Sometimes, you have to show tough love and put the proverbial boot down when team members start talking smack. They’ll thank you later.
6. Encouragement. A good leader encourages the team during a tough time to help them find the drive to make it through. Sometimes, encouragement can be as simple as wandering around the group, patting some backs, and giving smiles or friendly words.
7. Preparedness. A good leader never unexpectedly thrusts their team into bad times without some prior preparation. A good leader has a plan to cover all the possibilities and knows what to do if things don’t go exactly the way they were hoping.
8. Bravery. Fear can undermine the entire mission, whether the war is on a battlefield, a sporting field, or the sales floor. A good leader is brave and inspires his team with that bravery.
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5 Awesome Leaders throughout History and What Made Them Great

statue of the famous roman emperor Julius Caesar
There have been many leaders in history, but here are five whose greatness has stood the test of time.

Julius Caesar

Caesar is the quintessential ruler and one of history’s most emulated and celebrated figures. A brilliant general, he was also a political mastermind and facilitated the end of the Republic and the birth of the Empire. The dude also deserves some serious street cred…he was stabbed 23 times before dying.

George Washington

There was nothing particularly special about Washington’s generalship. However, he held a rag-tag army together through the Revolutionary War and played a key role in defeating the greatest empire of the day: Great Britain. What made Washington stand out as a leader is that a person of his stature and fame could easily navigate their way into the monarch’s role for life after the war. However, Washington was dedicated to the idea of a republic and refused to become more than a civilian leader—the United States’ first president.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon’s military genius, perseverance, and contagious enthusiasm for victory made him great. Say what you will about his supposedly diminutive size, but the dude practically conquered all of Europe. After being deposed and exiled to Corsica, he secretly returned to France and rallied the army to his cause. He almost went on another unstoppable rampage, but the battle of Waterloo shut him down. This time, the British took no chances and exiled him to a small island off the coast of Africa.

Abraham Lincoln

One trait that makes a leader stand out is integrity, bravery, and calm in the face of fire; it takes a lot of leadership skill to hold a country together through civil war—and even more skill to help it heal and reconcile after the war is over. Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was also a great orator with firm resolution and belief in the American ideals promulgated by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Mahatma Gandhi 

It’s hard to win a battle with guns, tanks, and planes, but seemingly impossible without firing a single shot. Gandhi led India against British rule and preached non-violence ideas instead of leveraging the power of protests and boycotting. Gandhi’s commitment to peace and belief in the value of human life makes him stand out as a leader.

What the heck is Kaizen?

The enlarged magnifying glass word kaizen with other words related business in the background.

Kaizen is a philosophy, with origins in Japan, which is oriented at taking incremental steps towards improving business processes, products, and quality. It can be defined as a continuous effort by all employees of the organization to ensure continuous improvement of all the processes and systems in the organization. It thus also helps in eliminating waste from the organization. It can also be applied to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, which cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. Kaizen process aims at continuous improvement of processes and quality not only in the manufacturing sector but in other departments as well. In today’s world, Kaizen has been applied in different fields like healthcare, government, finance, software, and several other industries.


How is Kaizen implemented?

Kaizen activities are usually implemented by using the Plan‐Do‐Check‐Act (PDCA) cycle. This ensures that there is always an ongoing cycle in action to monitor changes and continue to improve upon them.

  • Plan ‐ Define the problem and develop potential solutions. The required objectives and processes are set and information is gathered which is needed to get the expected output.
  • Do – Implement the plan and execute the set processes. Collect data, if any, to be used in the subsequent phases.
  • Check – Evaluate results to see if the solution satisfied the expected outcomes. Search for any deviations in implementations from the plan. Convert the data obtained into information.
  • Act – Based on the information, if things are going well as per the plan, then take measures to stabilize the changes or otherwise, repeat the PDCA cycle if there are still some unresolved issues.

How does Kaizen work?


Kaizen works by reducing waste (muda) and eliminating work processes that are overly difficult (muri). It succeeds when employees at all the levels of the organization hierarchy look for scope for improvements and provide their suggestions and feedback based on their experience and observations. Generally, these suggestions are about small changes that can be made to existing business processes that can give positive results to the business over a long period of time. For this to work, it is important that it is made clear that any kinds of suggestions from anyone are welcome and there would be no negative impacts on
participation. Instead, the employees will be rewarded for participation in the day-to-day activities.

Kaizen’s five primary elements

Kaizen is founded upon five primary elements:

  • Quality Circles: A quality circle is a group of people who work on the same or similar project, who meet on a regular basis to identify, analyze and solve work‐related issues if any.
  • Improved Morale: It is an important step in achieving long-term efficiency and productivity.
  • Teamwork: Kaizen strives to help employees think that all are part of a team and need to put in collective efforts in order to succeed.
  • Personal Discipline: A commitment to personal discipline by each employee ensures that the team will remain strong.
  • Suggestions for Improvement: Gathering feedback from all the employees ensures that all problems are addressed before they become significantly huge.

Chris Daily