‘Kaizen’ing’ Your Business

If you’re unfamiliar with the term Kaizen, it is defined (by Wikipedia) as Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the better”, and refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, supporting business processes, and management.

They key thing to take note of is the “continuous improvement of process”. Kaizen is based on making little changes on a regular basis, always improving productivity.

At Ubertor, our Client Service team document a “Team Kaizen” at the end of their work week, that offers 1 way to improve workflow within Ubertor. Kaizen’s submitted range from simple improvements like adding a knowledge base article for a highly asked question in live chat (submitted by Uber Carl) to documenting step by step procedures for newly used programs like Basecamp for our Design and Client Service teams (submitted by Uber Tin).

In my first post for Ubertor culture, I explained that we are a team of 6. If we calculate how many Kaizen’s are applied per month, that’s 24! Which means, each month our team is improving 24 different aspects of our work flow.

The key to a great Kaizen (and probably the most important aspect), is not only the idea, but also the action plan that follows suit. I like to tell my team that a Kaizen without an action plan is simply a suggestion, and anyone can suggest “this” or “that”. Actions plans must state a clear goal, and ways to achieve this goal.

Test out the Kaizen philosophy with your team, and see what aspects of your business you can improve on.