The Employee Perspective in Lean Environment

Abstract

Lean approach focuses on elimination of wastes by continuously identifying slacks and removing them. From Human Resource Management perspective, unutilized work time and excess workers are considered as slacks. Increasing worker utilization and downsizing usually lead to reduced manufacturing costs. Lack of job security coupled with the need to accomplish more with less people constitutes a source of employee stress in lean enterprises. Increasing worker utilization is a short term solution to improve productivity but at the cost of welfare of the workers. This will eventually negatively affect the capability of an organization to innovate, which is harmful for the organization in the long run. An attempt has been made in this paper to develop an effective solution to this problem by suggesting a framework to identify the deficiencies existing in the current system so as to improve upon the same and move towards an improved state in the future Keywords: Lean organization, Employee, Stress, Welfare, Human Resource Management

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