The organizational strategy of Kaizen combines two words that represent concepts to describe a process of continual improvement. Kai (“change”) and zen (“for the better”). Developed by Masaaki Imai, Founder of Kaizen Institute, the idea of Kaizen is that everyday presents a new challenge and opportunity to improve upon every aspect of a business.
From operations processes and workforce communication to customer service, Kaizen proposes that company-wide change is possible through sustained development and education.
With a digital distribution method, continual improvement is streamlined and more easily achieved. We map how Beekeeper can play an essential role in consistently reinforcing the key components of the Kaizen method, which are also core functional tenets of our operational communication platform.
Create a Leadership-Led Culture of Transparency
A productive, healthy company culture prioritizes a matrix of interdependent elements including transparency, opportunity for development, and a robust feedback mechanism. Practicing transparency involves making sure business improvements are consistently visible and communicated often in the clearest way possible. This is an especially important part of Kaizen continuous improvement culture.
Leadership has the most important role in modeling this for their workforce. Managers likewise have to show a commitment and demonstrate guidance. With SaaS-based digital communication tools, features like communication streams and secure group messaging allow management to push messaging across the organization easily and quickly. This means your workforce gets the information they need in real-time to perform their jobs faster, reducing any room for speculation or the spread of misinformation due to outdated info.
Empower Your Mobile Workforce with Communication Tools
Goal-setting is one piece of the organizational puzzle when it comes to company alignment, but your workforce needs to have adequate resources – namely, a defined system and the right tools – in order to effectively carry them out. Whether your focus is employee engagement, cost reduction, or operational improvement, your workforce should be able to communicate and access relevant information at a moment’s notice.
For non-desk workers, a digital communication tool provides a virtual meeting place to instantly collaborate or get answers faster from fellow colleagues, in a convenient and familiar mobile format. Communication streams can be differentiated by team, location, or shift. Calling from chats relieves having to trade personal info, and allows quick syncs to happen from directly within the employee app. A mobile communication tool also provides:
- A way to share employee recognition
- Celebrations of company milestones, awards, or announcements
- Quick access to co-workers to ask a question
- The ability to check production timelines at different locations
- A way to keep pace with what other teams are working on
- Anonymized surveys for more honest employee feedback
Build Innovation Into Every Aspect of Your Business
What if your workforce could brainstorm and share their ideas about how to make the process better, and have it voted on by other staff and across departments? With our Innovation app, teams can access the app directly from their mobile phone via the navigation extensions.
A forum for voting and sharing ideas, the Innovation app helps to create full transparency and oversight over submissions. Knowing their voice is heard and that concrete action is possible to make their ideas a reality is a huge boost for team productivity and morale.
With the Innovation app, frontline workers can participate in voting rounds for ideas in regular, monthly or quarterly frequencies. This shows both trust and that their opinions and suggestions are valued, an exemplary way of building Kaizen methodology directly into your chosen digital communication tool. Ideas that receive the most votes can be evaluated for implementation, and then communicated out via Beekeeper.
