How to Create a Process-Based Culture

Toyota gets over a million ideas a year from their team members on how to improve their processes. Not all of them are good, and fewer are actually implemented, but one of the reasons that Toyota is a leader in their industry is that they have a system to turn good ideas into action. They have an engine behind process improvement.

Much of Toyota’s success is attributed to Kaizen, a Japanese philosophy that means “continuous improvement.” This leading car manufacturer sets the standard of a process-based culture that nearly every organization wants to emulate. Even organizations such as hospitals and postal services have adopted the Toyota Production System to become more efficient.

Why Every Company Needs to Create a Process-Based Culture

Everyone in an organization is supposed to come up with better ways to improve processes. The problem is they are doing it in a lot of different ways. A simple and relatable (though not perfect) example is this:

You walk into a company, and you’ll find some people say “metrics” while others say “KPIs.” Some people use the term “countermeasures’’ while others say “solutions’’ and some say “systems.”

This variability in just the terms being used — perhaps because people come from different backgrounds —…