Toyota the Art of Employee Discipline
To understand the formal Toyota discipline policies concerning employees, you must first understand what it means to be a Toyota employee. In Unit 3, assignment 1, I discussed Recruiting and Selection where the potential Toyota employee has to go through several processes including personality and stress tests and several interviews to be able to get in the door. Phase two of the process includes a physical work simulation which you must pass before you move on to the interviews. So the employee is well vetted as a “good fit” prior to ever being employed at this company.
In Unit 4, I discussed Training and Development of the Toyota employee. They are indoctrinated into the mindset of “kaizen”, which means continual improvement as well as set up with an individual employee plan which incorporates personality and skill sets which will evolve over the working lifetime of the employee. One point is that when Toyota hires someone, they intend for that person to never leave the company. This may be true of most companies, but Toyota, with a low 3% turnover rate and no layoff history, (O 'Brien, 2008) it actually makes this a reality.
Toyota establishes a bond of trust between management and labor early on in the life of the employee. The workers tend to look at the executive branch as trusted advisers or parental figures and rarely try to do anything to disappoint, instead they exceed expectations. Human nature being what it is, there will be some people who just do not conform and a company, either small or large, must have a process to deal with those issues.
He who stops being better stops being good. — Oliver Cromwell
Toyota Formal Disciplines:
Toyota has invested time, money and training into an employee so their first instinct when confronted with a problem, such as poor performance, is to involve the employee into a counseling session to identify the problem. Poor performance may be because the workload is to great or the individual has not been
In Unit 4, I discussed Training and Development of the Toyota employee. They are indoctrinated into the mindset of “kaizen”, which means continual improvement as well as set up with an individual employee plan which incorporates personality and skill sets which will evolve over the working lifetime of the employee. One point is that when Toyota hires someone, they intend for that person to never leave the company. This may be true of most companies, but Toyota, with a low 3% turnover rate and no layoff history, (O 'Brien, 2008) it actually makes this a reality.
Toyota establishes a bond of trust between management and labor early on in the life of the employee. The workers tend to look at the executive branch as trusted advisers or parental figures and rarely try to do anything to disappoint, instead they exceed expectations. Human nature being what it is, there will be some people who just do not conform and a company, either small or large, must have a process to deal with those issues.
He who stops being better stops being good. — Oliver Cromwell
Toyota Formal Disciplines:
Toyota has invested time, money and training into an employee so their first instinct when confronted with a problem, such as poor performance, is to involve the employee into a counseling session to identify the problem. Poor performance may be because the workload is to great or the individual has not been
References: Chappell, L. (2009, February 13). Toyota moves deeper into u.s. work cuts. Retrieved from http://www.workforce.com/article/20090213/NEWS01/302139997 Johnson, B. (2010, February 17). Toyota and the union-backed, government-led witch hunt. Big Government, Retrieved from http://biggovernment.com/brjohnson/2010/02/17/toyota-and-the-union-backed-government-led-witch-hunt/ O 'Brien, M. (2008, November 08). Cultural match.Human Resources Executive Online, Retrieved from http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=142321206 Wiscombe, J. (2007, January 8). Toyota driving diversity.Workforce Management , Retrieved from http://www.workforce.com/article/20070108/NEWS02/301089981