A Concept & Tool for Employees Involvement

In the decade of 1980, management techniques focusing on employee involvement, and empowerment through teamwork approach and interactive communications and on improving job design were not new, but Japanese companies seemed to implement such techniques much more effectively than others .The business lesson of the 1980's was that Japanese firms, in their quest for global competitiveness, demonstrated a greater commitment to the philosophy of continuous improvement than Western companies did (1). For such a philosophy the Japanese used the term Kaizen. Kaizen means improvement, continuous improvement involving everyone in the organization from top management, to managers then to supervisors, and to workers. In Japan, the concept of Kaizen is so deeply engrained in the minds of both managers and workers that they often do not even realize they are thinking Kaizen as a customer-driven strategy for improvement (2). This philosophy assumes according Imai that ''our way of life – be it our working life, our social life or our home life – deserves to be constantly improved'' (3). There is a lot of controversy in the literature as well as the industry as to what Kaizen signifies. Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy for process improvement that can be traced to the meaning of the Japanese words 'Kai' and 'Zen', which translate roughly into 'to break apart and investigate' and 'to improve upon the existing situation' (4). The Kaizen Institute defines Kaizen as the Japanese term for continuous improvement. It is using common sense and is both a rigorous, scientific method using statistical quality control and an adaptive framework of organizational values and beliefs that keeps workers and management focused on zero defects. It is a philosophy of never being satisfied with what was accomplished last week or last year (5) ,(6). Improvement begins with the admission that every organization has problems, which provide opportunities for change. It evolves around continuous improvement involving everyone in the organization and largely depends on cross-functional teams that can be empowered to challenge the status quo. Figure 1:Κaizen umbrella-concept leadership Cross-fuctional teams 5S Productivity Improvemetnt Process Focus Discipline In the Workplace Teams Improvement The Kaizen Philosophy Figure2: The kaizen constituents The essence of Kaizen is that the people that perform a certain task are the most knowledgeable about that task; consequently, by involving them and showing confidence in their capabilities, ownership of the process is raised to its highest level (7). In addition, the team …