Look what Toyota did!

Toyota’s health and wellness programs

A system that generates hundreds of thousands of cars each year needs each employee to work at the greatest capacity for maximum output and quality. Toyota realizes the way to achieve this level of productivity is to keep their employees healthy and well.

Their impressive wellness programs provide weight loss initiatives, support for quitting smoking, and health clinics for their employees. Each employee gets up to five weeks of conditioning training before being sent to work on the line.

The job is strenuous and demands repetitive physical exertion. This can easily cause injuries, but each worker conducts a “daily evaluation of wellness” to help prevent stress or strain on the plants most valuable resource: their employees. Obviously, Toyota knows a healthy workforce is a productive workforce.

Toyota’s children’s center

For employees with families, the nearby off-site child care facility, run by Bright Horizons Family Solutions, creates an enriched, safe, beautiful environment for children to spend their days, or nights, depending on their parent’s shift.

Available only to TMMI employees, parents have no worries knowing their children have the best care possible. The rooms are grouped by age and vary in ratio depending on the age of the children. Toyota subsidizes the center to ensure the employees are getting the best care available, but not having to pay the high cost.

Toyota’s quality control systems

Each employee thinks of the next person to work on the automobile as their customer. Their goal is not to pass on a problem to the next area of production, but to ensure their product is flawless for the next step in the process. This attitude benefits the consumer by providing multiple system checks throughout the assembly process. Each person on the line is taking personal responsibility for the quality of the product. This creates a multi-layered system of quality-checks as the vehicle moves along the assembly line.

I witnessed the test track area where random cars are driven in all types of weather to determine whether it is up to the standard of quality expected by Toyota. The testers’ trained ears listen for sounds we could never hear as they maneuver through the areas of the track that test brakes, suspension, and overall performance. This is the final step in a long line of quality checks along the production line. They seldom find any problems in this phase, due to all of the checks along the way, but the step is performed every day, all day long.

Employee pride

When I met the woman who works at the end of the line as one of the final quality-control check points, she proclaimed her pride in seeing a Toyota driving around her town. Each car represents a job well done, not only by her, but by every member of her team.

She experiences the thrilling “I made that!” feeling every 90 seconds as a completed car rolls off the line. This is the same genuine enthusiasm my son feels at the end of the day at his accomplishments and work. Having a job where employees know their participation is a crucial part of a complex process created this sense of ownership. We should all feel so lucky to feel this pride in the jobs we perform every day.

Eileen drives a 10-year-old Toyota Sienna minivan that she loves, though it has lost any trace of it’s swagger. When she’s not trying to sneak a new 2011 Sienna out of the plant (it didn’t fit it in her purse) she’s the Chief Mom Connector of Mom Central and blogs about her family’s adventures at calandroclan.com. You can connect with her on twitter as @calandro5 and @MomCentralChat.

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Disclosure: Eileen was flown to Indiana by Toyota for a tour of their plant. All travel expenses were compensated for this trip.

Eileen Calandro