Top 10 Lean Tips From 2024

As 2024 comes to an end and we look toward 2025 I wanted to revisit some tips. The Lean Tips published daily are meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledgeable tidbits about Lean to help you along your journey. Here are the top 10 Lean tips from this past year:

Lean Tip #3595 – Communicate the Excitement

Many people resist change. Even when things are not going well, given a choice between the status quo and trying something new, many will choose the path of least resistance. Communication is key to getting employees excited and engaged in the workplace. To feel part of the company culture, people need to understand it. There is no doubt about it—onboarding drives employee engagement. Communicate your company mission and values through a fun promotional campaign that helps reinforce your company’s mission and values to employees throughout the year.

Lean Tip #3607 – Ensure Staff Psychological Safety

This is a crucial element to get right. After all, employees don’t want to feel like attempts at innovation could threaten their jobs if it goes wrong.

Your staff members need to be able to be honest and forthright about new product and systems suggestions, without fear of recrimination or adverse effects on their jobs.

So, one of the first things you should do when encouraging innovation is to set clear ground rules and let people know that their positions won’t be at risk if the innovation exercise isn’t a success.

Lean Tip #3608 – Be Open to Change

The first step in becoming more innovative is to develop a mindset that is open to change. Innovation involves coming up with new ideas or new systems for completing tasks. Being overly connected to the way things are done presently may limit your creativity. You can practice being open to change by participating in newly implemented processes or by attending a new work event or professional outing. You can also improve your mindset by telling yourself that change is good and that you can adjust to new circumstances.

Lean Tip #3639 – Improve Your Process with Time Studies

One of the most significant resources wasted within a business is time. Being able to accurately measure and gauge how much time a process takes on behalf of your employees can offer insight into where you can optimize a process. It’s as simple as using software to time a process. Then, you can analyze how long processes take and find ways to eliminate wasted time. This could be in the form of automating approvals and reducing touch-points, thereby preventing potential bottlenecks and delays from occurring.

Lean Tip #3645 – Create Your Own Kaizen Guidelines

While there are many resources available to guide you through your kaizen efforts, it’s important to personally understand your company’s kaizen journey. Reflecting on your kaizen efforts after improvements have been implemented is an important part of the continuous improvement cycle.

As you reflect on your efforts, develop your own kaizen guidelines. Start by creating guidelines based on your own experiences improving the workplace. Keep in mind that these guidelines should be for your colleagues, your successors, and yourself to understand the problems you have overcome. These guidelines will ultimately help you as you approach your next challenge.

Lean Tip #3646 – Focus on the Process, Not the Goal

Process focus might be the most significant difference between kaizen management and traditional management styles. Kaizen is based on a philosophy of slight, incremental, continuous improvement. When this style is fully operational, it creates a self-sustaining cycle of opportunities and solutions to reduce waste of time, money, and resources. Goal-oriented management focuses on control with a limited definition of success, while kaizen is flexible and adaptive. It uses metrics for evaluation rather than to measure the improvements and meet a predefined number. Finally, process-oriented management looks at the big picture, while goal-oriented management is more narrowly focused on the short term.

Lean Tip #3655 – Never Give Up

Whenever thinking about Kaizen continuous improvement you need to recognize that the ‘continuous’ part of the strategy is extremely important. This is a strategy that should be implemented as soon as possible and then continued indefinitely into the future. As soon as one improvement is made, it is time to start looking at what the next improvement opportunity will be.

It is also important to remember that there will be failures along the way. Some ideas will be tried and found to not produce the results that are needed. When this happens make sure you and your team don’t get discouraged or give up. Instead, start the process of finding and implementing improvements over and you’ll soon achieve the results you were hoping for.

Lean Tip #3656 – Leverage Influential Employees

Every organization has leaders and employees who seem to automatically understand and buy into new initiatives. If any of these team members are looked up to by the rest of the team, leverage their credibility to help create buy-in. When speaking about the upcoming change during meetings, ask these leaders and employees to speak up and give their opinions in front of the team.

Lean Tip #3658 – Provide Support, Training and Development

Sometimes it’s not that employees don’t want to embrace new changes – it’s simply that they don’t have the skills or knowledge to adapt to them. Provide them with training and development programs as part of the change process to invest in their growth and ensure they’re adequately prepared for the changes ahead. Allow sufficient time for your team to become prepared for any new responsibilities as far ahead of the change implementation as possible.

Lean Tip #3662 – Involve your Staff in the Life of the Company

Usually, your staff knows more than anyone else where the operational wastes are. They know the opportunities for improvement, and they often even know the solutions. It's not necessary to make any large capital investments to tackle improvements.

Involving your staff will improve their well-being and the performance of your business.

Make visible the standards reached by the work teams. Share the goals with regular meetings and internal publications: boards, magazines, mailings, etc.

These 10 Lean tips can help you with your journey in 2025. What advice would you share for the New Year?