Why job promises are essential to Kaizen Continuous Improvement

Would you devote your heart & soul to work yourself out of a job?

If you "worked your friend out of job", would you be eager to start another round of "improvements" - wondering if it would be your job that got eliminated next?

Once the appropriate size workforce has been determined (after the most gross inefficiencies have been eliminated),
the top priority of your Change Agent must be to convince management to promise that no one will ever lose their job due to continuous improvement efforts.

How?

Ideas for what to do with the free time and spare cash created from process improvement efforts

Should we promise that no one will ever lose their job?

No.

If someone has a bad attitude, or can't work in a team environment, or isn't comfortable with so much constant change - management should help them find work more suited to them.

If market demand goes down - then jobs might follow.

But no one should lose their job directly because of process improvements.

Aren't job guarantees important to unions too?

Yes. You will find it challenging enough to educate your work force and their union that all of this continuous improvement stuff isn't really just another management attempt to squeeze more and pay less.

If you're coming to the union negotiating table without job guarantees, you'd better have a pretty convincing story about some threat to the very existence of the company.

And if you don't have a union? Job guarantees might be a good way to keep it that way.