Key Points

• Daily Kaizen is one of the best ways to try to improve something new every day.
• The goal with daily Kaizen is to set up good habits that work for both personal and work-related goals.
• The best part is that daily Kaizen is super easy to do and can be done in two to three minutes.

For better or worse, we live in a world where overnight success and quick transformations grab all the headlines. It’s not necessarily the best way to go about business, as overnight success can be hard to keep up long term, and it overlooks just how important and meaningful small but consistent change can be.

This is precisely why Kaizen has grown so popular as a business methodology, because it doesn’t stress the need to become an overnight business success. Instead, Kaizen is all about the small and frequent daily changes that can take place, which all add up together and lead to long-term gains for a company.

What Is Kaizen?

To understand the benefits of daily Kaizen, you really have to understand Kaizen on a fundamental level. In this regard, Kaizen is actually the combination of two words: Kai, which means “Change,” and Zen, which means “Good.” In other words, the notion of Kaizen, when said together, is the concept of “change for the better,” which you might also recognize as being directly related to Continuous Improvement.

Kaizen essentially came to fruition in post-World War II Japan as the country was rebuilding itself from the horrors and destruction of war. The idea was heavily influenced by two Americans, W. Edwards Deming, who gets most of the credit, and Joseph Juran, both of whom introduced the idea of continuous improvement to Japanese manufacturers.

Arguably, the very best example of how successful Kaizen has been is Toyota, the automobile manufacturing giant. By introducing Kaizen into some of its manufacturing workstreams, Toyota achieved lower costs, produced cars, and did so at a higher quality. Of course, Kaizen isn’t just about cars, as it has its place in software, banking, finance, government, and healthcare.

What Is Daily Kaizen?

In the grand scheme, Kaizen can be many different things, and can happen over a long or short period of time. For all intents and purposes, daily Kaizen doesn’t get as much press as long-term change, but daily Kaizen is no less important. So, what is it?

Simply stated, daily Kaizen is looking at a list of small changes that can be made in a few hours or days and done naturally, often by individuals and teams already at a job. Unlike Kaizen Events, which are focused more on complex and large problems, daily Kaizen is about minor changes.

Quick Daily Kaizen Example

In a best-case scenario, you will outline a simple process to get started with your first daily Kaizen move. Your first step is likely to be to pick one area to improve, such as time management. The second step in a daily Kaizen move would be to say that this time management would be improved by batching together all of your emails into one hour at work.

The third step is to test this idea tomorrow and see how it performs, which brings you right to the fourth step, which involves reflecting on what worked. Within this fourth step, identify what about your time management adjustments around emails can be tweaked, and then test again tomorrow.

Small Problems Becoming Big Ones? Daily Kaizen to the Rescue

When you look at small issues that can become big ones, like a cluttered inbox, it stands to reason that something like daily Kaizen can make your life a whole lot easier. Even just small tweaks that take place daily, that only require a few minutes of time, can make a dramatic change and shift in how your day goes.

Making Small Improvements

Ultimately, one of the biggest ways daily Kaizen is going to come to the rescue is through making small improvements. The hope is that compounding good habits will lead to greater overall improvement. The best part is that this applies to both individuals, as Toyota learned when it focused on daily machine maintenance that prevented $500,000 fixes on the production line. The hope is that minor, daily tweaks, even something that requires just five minutes to check or fix, can prevent hours of rework.

In the workplace, adjusting a meeting structure or standardizing one report format might be a huge difference maker. For example, if you create just one standard report format and use it for one month, you could potentially see errors reduced on reports by as much as one-third or half, according to historical reporting.

Personal Changes

On the personal side, try something that feels like you are creating one good habit daily, like making the bed or cleaning a room. Each day that you do this, you are going to feel just a little better and know that you won’t come home to a disorganized space. It’s important to remember that while daily Kaizen is often focused on business changes, it has real-world applications for your life.

Continuous Effort

If you look at continuous effort, it’s a reminder that daily effort compounds small improvements, which means significant gains over time. This is essentially a prime metaphor for how planting seeds in dirt can lead to a thriving garden a few weeks later. The hope is that by undertaking tasks that lead to continuous effort, you can avoid big disruptions.

For most people, daily Kaizen and the PDCA cycle, or Plan-Do-Check-Act, creates a system that is easy to follow. This might be a good example for how to plan a five-minute meeting tweak that leaves the last few minutes of a meeting for Q&A. Setting this time aside might end up making everyone more productive, so nobody leaves a meeting with unanswered questions.

Small Scale Changes

Of course, you have to know that small-scale changes, even something as minor as organizing a single email folder daily, are going to be easier to sustain than trying to overhaul your inbox at once. These large tasks often fail because they are unsustainable, whereas smaller tasks can have long-term benefits because they reduce stress and lead to higher productivity.

Building Your Daily Kaizen Habit

One of the best ways to build your daily Kaizen habit is to look at everything using a two-to three-minute rule. If something takes less time than this to perform, do it right now, which feels very much like cleaning up a room or making a bed before leaving.

This doesn’t mean that you need to search out problems, but it does mean that if you have already identified repetitive manual tasks in a work environment or unclear communication chains, you know where to start.

Similarly, if you have identified slow startup times on a computer or piece of software critical to work, or software that requires an update, these are all red flags that you should focus on to build up your daily Kaizen habit of making changes.

The most important takeaway here is that daily Kaizen isn’t a one-time deal; it’s a mindset that needs to stay, whether you are a frontline employee or a senior executive. It’s everyone’s responsibility to not just identify what needs to be improved, but to help sustain improvements once they are made.

Taking Personal Responsibility

If individuals don’t take personal responsibility and or accountability, even the best ideas, even if it’s like cleaning a room, will fizzle out before they can really take hold. This is one of the best lessons, as it shows that if you improve 1% each day, you’ll be 37 times better in a year, according to a famous Kaizen principle.

This fact alone is a reminder that daily Kaizen cannot and should not be a one-time event and isn’t about a single “fix,” but it’s continuous and ongoing.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

One of the most important takeaways from the idea of Kaizen is its applicability in every field. This is especially true if you look at daily Kaizen practices for a stronger security posture. Of course, you can also look at Kaizen from a different angle and focus on how it fosters team collaboration.

On the other hand, there are plenty of other subjects worth reading about, like how to raise the bar on call center service. On a different topic, working on how to use continuous improvement for evolving cyber threats is another prime reading subject that has real-world applications.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, understanding how daily Kaizen can play a big role in your life, there are a lot of reasons why this can make considerable improvements in your life. Daily Kaizen is something that everyone can do, and it can make real-world impacts almost immediately, if not the same day.