Business sustainability through employees involvement: A case study

Abstract

Business sustainability is dependent on many factors but one of the most uncontrollable factor is employee´s involvement and collaboration. Frequently employees are working and acting like "androids" day-afterday, repeating the same routines with no motivation or enthusiasm, feeling that any requests would not be attended by their supervisors. The objective of this paper is to present how some simple ideas could connect and involve employees and supervisors in a continuous improvement journey in an inbound logistics area of an automotive sector company. The new ideas were implemented through an action-research methodology. Results achieved included new ideas and contributions for the problems (59 problems identified) of their sector promoting the company's financial and social sustainability.

Continuous improvement and business sustainability in companies of an emerging market: Empirical analysis

“…This concept is related to meet the necessities in the short, medium, and long term without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs (Liu, Wu, Zhong & Liu, 2020;Rezaee, 2016). According to BS, "social" refers to the impact of business activity on the workforce and surrounding communities, "environmental" is to maintain consumption below nature's regeneration ability, and "economic" is the persistent financial return (Vicente et al, 2015;Medne & Lapina, 2019).…”

“…For instance, Mårtensson, Snyder and Ingelsson (2019) advise managers to have a better comprehension of the relation between Lean implementation and BS to achieve high performance. More concretely, Vicente, Alves, Carvalho and Costa (2015) analysed employee involvement and collaboration concerning BS and revealed that the problems are related to salaries, lack of information and no-open conversation with managers that are on top of the business hierarchy. Meza-Ruiz, Rocha-Lona, Soto-Flores, Garza-Reyes, Kumar & López-Torres (2019) indicate that strategies such as self-assessment, benchmarking, corporate reporting, strategic planning, and systematic training, are significant facilitators of BS.…”

Lean Manual Assembly 4.0: A Systematic Review

“…Worker development defines the Toyota Production System (TPS) culture of respect and teamwork, and although it does not directly relate to bottom-line results, it is an integral component of the TPS implementation of kaizen (continuous improvement) [213]. There are simple ways to involve operators and supervisors in the continuous improvement journey, and they are built on showing the importance and effect of everyone's actions towards addressing the problems together [214]. One-point lessons have been found effective in sustaining the standardization and optimization in LPS [215].…”

A symbiotic relationship between Lean Production and Ergonomics: insights from Industrial Engineering final year projects

“…The application of kaizen methodology, besides reducing existent wastes, improves the reduction of the high value of overtime. Also, the involvement of people in continuous improvement leads to learning organisation [43] and business sustainability, as in the case of P36 [64].…”