The Story of Our Changes - Our KAIZEN Story
In 2001, ISOWA celebrated the 80th Anniversary of the founding of the company. Within the company during that time, the workforce was dominated by robot-like employees who thought things like, "I shouldn't say a word," "I should keep out of other people's work," and "I just have to put up with doing my job" and who did the work they were given in just the way they were told to do it, things that were the exact opposite of the principles for action set up by the company. Under those circumstances, on October 7th of that year, an 80th Anniversary Memorial Lecture was given that became a huge source of motivation in the reformation of our company after that.
In April 2009, at the same time as the start of the new fiscal year, we made a lot of huge changes to the layout of our office. I think that the issue of "breaking down the walls between departments" is something that comes up in all eras and at all companies sometime or another. With the idea of "first, let's try to have a more open environment," we decided on a layout in which we took out all of the office walls, pushed taller cabinets back into the corners of rooms, and connected all departments with a single wide corridor. Once that was finished, a bunch of different little discussions (that you couldn't really call actual meetings) suddenly started taking place here and there, and information began to be spread rapidly. We were able to really feel how important it is, in order to create a more open working environment to be able to have an environment in which people can, even now, in this age of email, actually get together like this and meet face-to-face to talk when ever they want to.
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