Just as much as kaizen or the philosophy of continuous improvement is used to have all employees at all company levels work together proactively to achieve regular, incremental improvements to the manufacturing process, so you can have all members of your household working together to strive for continual improvement of conditions in your home.
Don’t have one person be the lord and master instead, have all family members offer their suggestions in a regular get together meetings and work with the suggestions that can be achieved. You will see that the atmosphere and the aura of your home improves and everyone will be much happier being part of a working process in a happy home.
Keep in mind that Kaizen is a part action plan and also part philosophy. As an action plan, kaizen is all about organizing events that are focused on improving specific areas within the company. Your home is not a company, but it too can constantly use improvement where the family can live together in harmony.
As a philosophy, kaizen is all about building a culture where all employees are actively engaged in suggesting and then implementing improvements to the company.
In your home, once family member begins helping one another with the usual daily tasks you will see how much can be accomplished during the time it would take one family member to do a task. With children, who are of age to also help out, it can make a world of difference to teaching them certain tasks and help them understand why they are necessary to accomplish. You will see that even children can be proud of what they have learned and glad that you taught them these tasks.
Kaizen works alongside standardized work since standardized work takes care of the best practices for a certain process and kaizen then find improvements for these processes.
You can make use of a typical kaizen event even in your home. First of all, you must set goals and see what needs improving in your home and then make sure everyone understand why these goals must be met.
Then you can also develop a plan for improvement and implement the improvements. Once a certain task has been accomplished, have a family meeting so that you can get feedback from them as to how satisfied they are with what has been done and if they understand why it had to be done. This will give them the incentive to do other tasks and always consider what improvements might be made.
It is interesting to note that kaizen as an action plan is just what develops kaizen as a philosophy. Then kaizen is applied as an action through continual and consistent successful kaizen events to also teach employees or as the case may be family members to think differently about their work or tasks.
Implement it just right, and you can have a most harmonious home life.
