Are you looking for that perfect Valentine's gift for your teams this year? In the box of improvement methods, Kaizen provides the sweetest team engagement, pride, ownership, innovation, and many transformational results (beyond what teams and leaders thought possible).

Have You Considered The Gift of Kaizen? 

Kaizen comes in multiple flavors

1. Principles of Conduct, a guide for conducting life.

2. Companywide Management Program

3. Work Process Improvement Method

This is the most common use of Kaizen. A Kaizen event is a team-based approach, to improving work processes, processing through all phases of the improvement cycle effectively and rapidly.  This is accomplished in a brief period, typically 5 days, with full benefits achieved within 1 day -3 months.   

The Kaizen Gift 

• Interactive training (all participants bring a work process problem to begin resolving during training).
• Access to ~40 improvement methods, job aids, and templates.
• 1-1 project coaching.
• Co-leading the 1st Kaizen event (on-site) to solve a significant work process problem and achieve rapid benefits. This ensures the team achieves their goals, gets a return on the investment, and gains confidence to lead more Kaizen events.

The BENEFITS of Kaizen Events

OUTCOMES

• Results (typical): >$50K savings/year; significant increases in work process time, quality, customer satisfaction and outcomes, productivity, and capacity.
• Results sooner, within 0-3 months, and more than expected.

SKILLS & CAPACITY

• Development of in-house knowledge and skills to continually, confidently, and independently lead teams through the Kaizen process to rapidly solve problems.
• Use of data and measures to understand and create high-performance.
• Demonstrate a CAN-DO change culture.

TEAM MEMBERS

• Energy, excitement, ownership, and pride in improving work processes and team environment.
• More capacity to perform other duties.
• Timely decision making.
• Involvement & excitement for more change and improvements.

The CHALLENGES 

• It is Ok for a team to take 6-12 months to solve problems and create results thinking.
• "It's always been done this way" thinking. It is ok for a team to take 6-12 months to solve problems and create results. 

What Others Have Achieved

After receiving this gift: 1 Kaizen event leader independently led 12 Kaizen events the following year.

More Kaizen events create more benefits! In addition, techniques learned within Kaizen training can be used broadly throughout the organization to create additional improvement, such as the following:

• Team huddles that link performance measures with continually improving and keeping sticky the already improved processes.
• Documented work processes and procedures.
• Openly identify waste & value to eliminate wastes.
• Use of data to understand where time-consuming waste, and frustration exist and how work is really done.
• Use goal statements for meetings, annual goals, communicating, training, 
• Improve open communications and active listening to improve team productivity and decrease rework.
• Use prioritization techniques for daily activities and decisions.
• Stop problems from happening again and again; help individuals and teams get to the root causes of problems and identify better solutions.
• Use the change management process and communication techniques to help others prepare for and embrace change.
• Use adult learning principles and effective teaching methods.
• Convert more learnings into actions; elevate everyone's knowledge to higher levels.