Kaizen: Little and Often

Introduction

I'm going to explain what Kaizen sessions are and how and why engineering teams have them. I'm then going to explain how and why the InsideOut Engineering Team incorporates Kaizen sessions and the Kaizen philosophy in a more unconventional manner.

What are Kaizen Sessions?

Kaizen Sessions are an opportunity for members of the engineering team to use a portion of their working day for self improvement. You may have heard of these sessions also be referred to as 'self-learning', 'self-study', 'self-improvement', 'innovation-time' etc. but the reason we at InsideOut use the term 'Kaizen', is because of the philosophy behind it that we try to adopt.

The term 'Kaizen' is a Japanese business term meaning 'change for the better', or 'continuous improvement'. There are a few different implementations of Kaizen, but for the sake of this blog post, I'd like to touch on the 5 core elements of the Kaizen approach:

1. Teamwork
2. Personal Discipline
3. Improved Morale
4. Quality Circles (groups specifically brought together to identify potential improvements)
5. Suggestions for Improvement

By keeping these 5 principals at the heart of an engineering team, one creates a culture not only of self-development, but co-operative development. That is to say, everyone feels supported and motivated to better themselves and each other.

Why have Kaizen sessions?

We all know how quickly technology moves and having the time to keep up with the latest tech is a big challenge. As such, it's common practice for tech companies to afford a given amount of time to members of their engineering team for 'self-learning'. This is both beneficial for the employee as it keeps their skills sharp and their knowledge up to date, ultimately, making them more valuable in their own careers, but also to the employer who, in turn, will have sharper engineers at their disposal, as well as engineers who feel valued by the company.

InsideOut vs. The World

The amount of time given to engineers for self-learning varies from company to company, but the most common schedules I've come across are one afternoon a month, one day a month, one day a quarter and one afternoon a quarter.

At InsideOut, however, we've upped this to one afternoon a week and it makes everyone happier, more collaborative (somewhat more competitive) and, importantly, more productive.

Let me explain...

We tried once a quarter and we tried once a month and they were both fine. Everyone looked forward to tackling their own projects and felt grateful for having the time to learn.

But...

Sessions spread out this far apart presented some glaringly obvious problems which, I would argue, made them next to pointless! In no particular order:

1. Frustration: We'd be left wanting to have learned more in the allotted time, and had to wait another month (or 3!) for our next learning opportunity.
2. Fatigue: We tried to cram as much as possible into a relatively short amount of time, meaning energy and productivity levels were noticeably down for the following day (and sometimes for the rest of the week).
3. Retention: It was difficult for us to retain what we'd learned due to the gap between learning sessions. It's far better to learn 'little and often'.
4. A lack of desire to learn something directly associated with current company-work. After-all, we all have things we want to learn and projects we want to work on that aren't necessarily associated with work!
5. An unfair 'urgent' work distribution. So, if something urgent came up that required an engineer, it's pretty unfair for that engineer to lose (potentially) a quarter of their yearly learning time to fix something.
6. A lack of desire to teach someone else something. Even though we wanted to, we were conscious that knowledge-sharing took up a large chunk of our self-learning time.

At InsideOut we feel like we've solved all of these problems and in doing so, found further benefits. In summary, we participate in weekly Kaizen sessions that start at 14:00 and span the rest of the day. At 14:00, the engineering team joins a video call and our aim is to spend about 60 minutes knowledge sharing where our target is for every person to bring something to the table - even if it's a question that they know another engineer has the expertise to answer and teach everyone. Afterwards, everyone goes away and progresses with their self-learning for the rest of the day.

The benefits we've noticed to this approach, amongst others, are:

1. Creates a culture of continuous learning and development (self-improvement).
2. Creates a culture of teaching and progressing the people around you.
3. Creates a culture of business improvements.
4. Gives each engineer the time to pursue a proper educational path, with better knowledge retention due to a 'little and often' learning approach.
5. Engineers are happy to jump on bits of work during Kaizen, should they need to.
6. Engineers are happy to prioritise a deadline they may have over their self-learning.
7. Engineers are much more likely to further their knowledge in areas directly beneficial to their work, with some choosing to alternate week-by-week between personal projects and work-related learning.
8. Engineers are happier in general and feel more appreciated and cared for.
9. Having one afternoon that's almost guaranteed to be slower-paced makes the team more productive and feel more rested for the rest of the week.

In other words:

The InsideOut engineering team are happier, healthier, more productive and more collaborative!

Conclusion

By having regular sessions like this, a culture of self-improvement, self-discipline and improving and helping others is almost guaranteed. We trialled it with a view to monitoring our output and seeing if our work got affected, and if so, by how much. The results were that our output measurably improved week-on-week, and moreover, everyone felt encouraged and supported to get better which made everyone happier and more achieved in their personal growth.

I'd highly recommend this approach for all engineering teams, not least because I consider it a win for both parties in a professional capacity, but because it's a huge win in a personal one. On paper, of course, the engineering team gets 1 afternoon 'off' a week, but we all know that what's on paper can often be a far cry away from reality.

Maximilian Coghlan
Full Stack Software Engineer at InsideOut