You have surely come across this in your company. Lean production practices and competition ultimately come down to the employees. In that situation, employees whose trust you have not won, who have not identified themselves with the company values, who have no self-discipline, and who are not satisfied with the income they earn and therefore with their job, refuse to contribute to preventing waste, and the work either comes to a halt or moves forward very slowly.
Toyota has also shown a leading approach to teamwork. A principle of working in teams, in which individual development is encouraged for every employee, has been established. As is known, Toyota offers job security to employees from the start. In this way many problems are solved before they begin. In such an environment, employees can turn to new questions and problems and focus on the solution.
In this article we will explain what needs to be done to win employees' trust, to motivate them, and to ensure that they take part in the lean production system.
1. Develop communication with your employees that is built on trust. As you know, communication built on lies, or on promises you cannot keep, will not last long. Because a failure to meet one party's expectations will directly eliminate trust, what is said will no longer be credible and will become a problem.
2. Honor your employees for their successes. Recognizing employees' successes and appreciating them is of great importance. Recognizing even the smallest success of an employee, and seeing it put into practice, is priceless. In particular, once the idea that ideas are being stolen takes hold among employees, it is very hard to go back. It can cost a great deal. For that reason you need to take precautions even at the smallest suspicion, and you need to prevent the theft of ideas. Foremost among the most important problems encountered in many companies is managers stealing employees' ideas. Even when this is not actually the case, employees do not take part because they convince themselves of it. For this reason it is very important to recognize even employees' smallest successes and to be fair to them.
3. Share opportunities for advancement fairly. In most businesses, employees stay in the same position even after working for many years. There are two important reasons for this. The first is that the company does not give employees enough opportunity to advance, and the second is that employees avoid doing what their development requires. An employee who is far from being technically competent, and who cannot seize any opportunity to develop, naturally does not contribute to lean production work either, with the thought "what benefit will it have for me".
4. Train employees continuously. The benefit of training is beyond dispute, yet unfortunately the subject is not given the attention it needs in our country. Especially when employees start the job, they often know very little about the work and the company. An employee who receives no training at the start of the job and develops their own way of working then remains outside the standard for the whole system. On the other hand, the number of people in our country who receive training in a technical sense is so small that, consider this, there are many people who do not know the difference between mm and m. Training your employees helps them work in better conditions. Whether in your company or somewhere else, it always helps them earn better. An employee who realizes this begins to contribute to the work, regarding themselves as valued and honored. They begin to act with dedication.
5. Share your successes. Share what is gained when something is completed successfully. For example, put practices in place so that employees tire less. In this way, let employees also receive a share of these improvements. You will then see that they contribute more.
