The core of Toyota's corporate culture lies in five aspects: challenge, continuous improvement, genchi genbutsu, respect for employees, and team management skills and cooperation. Small team cooperation is that each production unit on the front line, a group of 5 to 8 people, forms a basic production team, led by a team leader, and the members assist each other to complete production tasks together. . If every employee can do their best to perform their duties, powerful power can be generated, and this power can form a power ring and create great productivity! - Kiichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota Motor Corporation

In Japan, one day an international student drove a Toyota car to the supermarket for shopping. When he came out of the supermarket, he found an old man wiping his car carefully. He thought the old man might be a beggar, but when he looked carefully, he He is well-dressed and has an extraordinary temperament. When he approached the Toyota car, the old man bowed deeply and said: "Thank you for using the Toyota car. As a Toyota person, I have the obligation to clean the car for you." A retired old man, whose team management skills are so important to his company's products There are such strong feelings. This is Toyota culture, a spiritual belief rooted deep in the hearts of Toyota people.

As Toyota Motor Corporation founder Kiichiro Toyoda said: "If every employee can do their best to perform their duties, powerful force can be generated, and this force can form a circle of strength. , Create great productivity!" Every day, countless companies around the world visit Toyota, including its direct competitors General Motors and Ford. Although their production hardware facilities are similar, their operating performance is very different. It lies in the corporate culture hidden behind Toyota's lean production management model. Although the whole world is learning about lean production, most of them have only learned certain tools such as Kanban, 5S, JIT and intelligent automation. They have never understood the management principles and culture that support these tools, and the effect is greatly reduced.

The core of Toyota's corporate culture lies in five aspects: challenge, continuous improvement, genchi genbutsu, respect for employees, team management skills and cooperation

Challenge

Toyota Since its birth, it has been constantly challenging its own limits. After World War II, Japanese industry was in depression, but at this time, Toyota Motor Company founder Kiichiro Toyoda proposed the goal of "catching up with the United States in three years." They knew that if they blindly imitated American production and management methods, they would only suffer forever. Following others, bold innovations led to today's Toyota Production System (TPS). In just twenty years, Toyota's production efficiency increased from one-eighth of that of its American counterparts to five times that of its American counterparts.

Continuous improvement

At Toyota, each person submits an average of more than 75 improvement proposals every year, and more than 99% of the proposals are implemented. From the perspective of Toyota people, the current situation is always the worst, and tomorrow must be better than today. For Toyota, every grassroots employee is a problem solver. They have all received strict and systematic training according to their job requirements, mastered varying degrees of problem-solving skills, and are fully capable of assuming responsibilities within their own scope of work.

So, an Andon system was designed on the Toyota production line. As long as anyone finds an abnormality, he/she can use his or her own judgment to pull off the Andon, stop the production line, and stop the production line. The problem is solved and the problematic product is prevented from flowing into the next process. It is this kind of behavior that helped Toyota establish a problem exposure system. Ordinary employees think like managers and solve problems faced on site every day to promote continuous progress of the company.

Genchi Genbuto

Kiichiro Toyoda has a famous saying: "Technicians who wash their hands no more than three times a day are not considered competent at all." What he means is that technicians Sitting in the office all day long cannot create good products because he has no way of understanding the actual production conditions on site. Toyota culture advocates that everyone, regardless of their position, must go deep into the scene, thoroughly understand the true situation of what happened, and manage based on facts, so that decisions will not deviate from reality. Because of this, a company as large as Toyota can effectively avoid "bureaucracy."

President Akio Toyoda vows to "be the president closest to the front line", which is to take the lead in practicing Toyota's cultural "genchi genbutsu" and go deep into front-line sites such as marketing, production, and R&D. He believes in the most basic principles of management That is, thinking and developing together with employees can build quality at every stage of work.

Respect employees

Respecting employees means believing that every employee contributes to the enterprise and creating an organizational environment where everyone can truly utilize their talents. Toyota has achieved this. Toyota advocates a culture of servant leadership. Leaders are not those who give orders from above, nor are they judges of life and death, but coaches and consultants. Their mission is to assist their subordinates in completing tasks. For them, it is more about responsibilities and obligations than power.

At Toyota, employees practice self-management and do their own thing within the scope of the organization's responsibilities. They don't have to worry about being punished for work mistakes. On the contrary, employees who reveal problems will be praised, and mistakes must be punished. Internal reasons, as long as you find the cause and take countermeasures, it won't happen next time.

Toyota employees have a very strong sense of job security. They receive stable salary increases every year. Because their efficiency is higher than that of their peers, their overall salary level is also higher than that of their peers. Systematic training and job rotation also allow them to Quickly master work skills, everyone participates in management, and gain high work pleasure and sense of accomplishment. Even when the economy is bad, there is no need to worry, because Toyota will not lay off people at will. Even if it does, it will first be the salary of management personnel, not ordinary employees.

Team management skills and cooperation

As the scale of enterprise organizations becomes larger and larger, management becomes more and more complex, and most work needs to rely on team management skills and cooperation to complete. At Toyota, flexible team management skills have become one of the most common organizational forms. Sometimes the same person belongs to different team management skills at the same time and is responsible for completing different tasks.

The largest team collaboration is Toyota's new product development plan, which is driven by a large team with members from various departments, including marketing, design, and engineering. , manufacturing, procurement, etc., they work together in the same team management skills, which greatly shortens the time to launch new products, and the quality is higher and the cost is lower, because many issues have been fully considered from the beginning. It was solved by professionals before it caused any trouble.

Small team cooperation is that each production unit on the front line, a group of 5 to 8 people, forms a basic production team, led by a team leader, and the members assist each other ***Complete production tasks together. Unlike many domestic companies that implement piece-rate wages, employees complete their work independently.

It is the above five most typical Toyota culture that ultimately lead Toyota to excellence.

Although Toyota has recently been under strong pressure from the recall incident, I believe that Toyota is seriously introspecting and regaining Toyota culture. Through unremitting efforts, Toyota will not only avoid falling into crisis, but will also be more stable and confident in the future!