What Toyota's Kaizen Philosophy Taught Me About Workplace Wellbeing

When I first heard about Toyota's Kaizen philosophy, I pricked my ears up. They make my favourite cars, and I figured that a company doing that well had to be doing something right.

The more I looked into it, the more I kept thinking: I've seen this work. And I've seen what workplaces look like when no one is thinking about any of it.

Not in a factory. In a sales office, in a skydiving drop zone, and in years of watching people either thrive or quietly fall apart in the workplaces they spend most of their lives in.

Kaizen is a Japanese concept that roughly translates to "continuous improvement." Toyota built it into the DNA of how they operate, not through massive transformation projects, but through small, consistent improvements made by everyone, at every level of the business.

It doesn't sound revolutionary. But in practice, it's very different from how most organisations actually approach improvement.

And it has a lot more to say about workplace wellbeing than you might expect.

About to road trip in Western Australia in my new 20yr old Toyota Prado. One of the best cars Toyota made

Culture Improves Through Small Changes, Not Big Campaigns

A few years ago, I worked in a sales role where the culture was struggling. Staff turnover was high, people weren't happy, and management knew they had a problem.

Their solution was to bring in someone from the outside, a consultant with a strong reputation for turning workplaces around.

He was well-intentioned. I want to make that clear.

But a lot of what followed missed the mark. There were short-term competitions, attitude-based awards, hourly sales incentives, small prizes for whoever had the best energy that day. All of it designed to lift morale quickly.

The problem was that once the incentive disappeared, so did the behaviour. Worse, some of those incentives were attached to things people were already doing naturally, and once a reward entered the picture, the intrinsic motivation started to erode. People weren't doing it anymore because they wanted to. They were doing it for the prize.

What was missing wasn't another incentive. It was a genuine understanding of what was making the workplace harder than it needed to be day to day.

That's the first thing Kaizen gets right. Toyota didn't ask, "How do we improve by 50%?" They asked, "What is one small thing we can improve today?" And then they asked it again tomorrow.

A lot of wellbeing initiatives are designed for visibility. A wellness week. A resilience workshop. A mental health awareness campaign. These aren't bad things, but they treat wellbeing as an event rather than a practice.

What I've found, both from my own experience and from working with organisations now, is that the places with genuinely healthy cultures got there through hundreds of small improvements. Not one big intervention.

The People Closest to the Work Usually Have the Best Ideas

In that same sales role, there were people on the floor, myself included, who could have told management exactly where the friction was. We knew which processes wasted time. We knew what was frustrating customers. We knew which parts of the job were quietly burning people out.

The company did eventually send out a survey. But a survey often captures frustration, not insight. People vent, or they say nothing at all because they've learned that nothing will change anyway.

What Toyota understood was that you have to go further than a survey. Employees need to be coached on how to give useful feedback, not just "this is broken" but "here's what I think we could try instead." And management needs to close the loop when those suggestions actually lead to a change.

I started that job in my early forties. I wasn't building a 20-year career there, so I wasn't afraid to say what I thought. I was probably labelled difficult by some people. But I genuinely cared about the place improving.

Here's the irony: the people willing to speak up are often the people paying the closest attention. The ones who seem hard to manage are sometimes the ones who care the most.

What organisations often don't realise is that silencing those voices, or just ignoring them, doesn't just lose a good idea. It loses the trust of everyone watching to see whether speaking up is actually safe.

On that note: there were a few occasions in that role where I raised something that management eventually acted on. But when the change was announced, it was presented as their idea. No acknowledgement of where it came from.

That might seem like a small thing. But it isn't.

People don't just want to see improvements. They want to know that their voice contributed to those improvements. Something as simple as "a few team members raised this, and we've decided to make a change" would have made a significant difference. It tells people they're being heard. It encourages them to keep contributing. Over time, it creates a culture where improvement becomes everyone's responsibility, not just management's.

People can tolerate a lot of difficulty in a workplace. What they struggle to tolerate is feeling invisible.

Before Fixing the Person, Look at the System Around Them

This one is personal.

When I joined that sales role, I started during what was apparently the busiest month the company had ever had. The people who would normally handle onboarding were heads-down on sales. Completely understandable from a business perspective, but it meant new starters were left with the bare minimum to hit the ground running.

Another person started alongside me. She was younger, picked up systems quickly, and adapted fast. My strengths were different, building rapport, reading people, connecting with customers. Learning multiple platforms at speed wasn't where I naturally shone.

Early on, my numbers reflected that. I was stressed, slower than I should have been, and probably looked like a questionable hire on paper.

But here's what I know now: that wasn't a performance problem. It was an onboarding problem.

Once I understood the systems, everything changed. By the time I left, I was regularly among the top performers in the team. In my final months, I finished at the top of the sales leaderboard and closed the largest single sale in the company's history.

I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying it because it makes the point better than any theory can.

The strengths that drove that result had always been there. The system just hadn't allowed them to come through. And in the months it took me to get there, the business lost sales, I lost bonuses, and customers dealt with someone who wasn't yet operating at full capacity. Everyone paid for a fixable problem.

To their credit, management eventually listened. Within a few months, new starters were given dedicated onboarding with a trainer for around two weeks. The difference in confidence and early performance was noticeable.

Toyota's approach to this is clear: before you look at the person, look at the environment they're operating in. Burnout, disengagement, and underperformance are often symptoms of a system that isn't set up for people to succeed. Fixing the individual without fixing the system just produces the same outcome with the next person.

Consistency Creates Confidence

My years as a skydiving instructor gave me a very clear example of why standardisation matters, and how to introduce it without being heavy-handed about it.

Before every jump, instructors run through safety checks. We all completed the same checks, but our ops manager noticed there was some slight variation in how each of us went about them. Rather than calling us out or handing down a prescribed process, he came up with a simple idea that standardised things without ever making us feel like he didn't trust our judgment.

He asked each instructor to write down their own checks, in their own order, and then number them.

So when you're going through your checks in the plane, you count as you go. If your list has ten items and you only reach nine, you know immediately that something's been missed. You start again.

Simple. But it worked.

I remember several times reaching the end of my count and coming up one short. Because the system existed, I caught the gap. Without it, I might not have noticed until it was too late.

The lesson isn't really about skydiving. It's about this: you can't meaningfully improve a process you haven't standardised first.

When everyone's doing things differently, errors are invisible and improvements are impossible to measure. When there's a clear baseline, weaknesses become obvious and progress becomes trackable.

Standardisation isn't about removing individuality. It's about removing unnecessary variability, and that's a very different thing.

There Is No Finish Line, and That's Actually a Good Thing

A few years ago, I was training at an indoor skydiving centre in Sydney. I'd put a lot of work into improving my technique and was feeling reasonably good about where I was at.

A staff member I knew walked past and said, "Looking good, you're getting there."

Before I could respond, another instructor overheard and laughed.

"You never get there, mate. It's chasing rainbows."

We all laughed. Because we knew exactly what he meant.

In skydiving, and in freediving, breathwork, coaching, and most things worth getting good at, the goalposts keep moving. As soon as you reach one level, you discover the next one. There's always more precision available, more control, more depth.

At first, that sounds exhausting. But I've come to see it as one of the most freeing ideas I know.

If there's no finish line, then the goal isn't arrival. The goal is progress. And when progress becomes the goal, the pressure of perfection starts to lift. It starts to feel less like a race you can never win and more like a purpose, something closer to what the Japanese call ikigai. A reason to keep going that doesn't expire once you've achieved it.

Kaizen is built entirely on this idea. The goal isn't to solve everything once and call it done. It's to build a culture where people regularly ask, "What's one small thing we could do better?"

Most organisations approach workplace culture as if there's a destination. Get the right policy in place. Run the right programme. Hit the benchmark. Done.

The healthiest workplaces I've seen aren't the ones that have everything figured out. They're the ones that have built the habit of continuously looking for ways to improve, and made it safe for everyone to be part of that process.

What This Actually Means for Workplace Wellbeing

Most workplace wellbeing programmes treat wellbeing as a problem to be solved. A workshop here. An awareness month there. A meditation app or a gym subsidy.

These things aren't bad. At Base State, we run exactly these kinds of programmes, breathwork sessions, mindset workshops, nutrition facilitation, wellbeing days. Done well, they make a real difference to how people feel and perform.

But here's what makes Base State different: we don't just stop at the programme. We also work with leaders, managers, founders and HR teams on the cultural side, helping them understand and improve the conditions that either support or undermine everything else. Because a wellbeing programme sitting on top of a broken culture is like putting new tyres on a vehicle that's falling apart underneath. You can feel the difference briefly, but the underlying problem is still there.

What I've taken from Kaizen, after everything I've seen across sales, skydiving, coaching, and building Base State, is that the most sustainable wellbeing doesn't come from a single programme. It comes from a culture where small improvements are happening constantly.

Better onboarding so people aren't starting from a place of stress. Better feedback loops so people feel heard. Better awareness of what's already working before adding something new. Systems that give people's actual strengths room to come through.

None of that is dramatic. None of it makes a great headline.

But compounded over time, it creates something that no wellbeing day can replicate: a workplace where people feel genuinely supported, capable, and connected to the work they're doing.

The Story That Brought It All Home

I want to finish with a Toyota story that I think captures all of this better than any framework can.

Growing up in New Zealand, the Hilux wasn't just a vehicle, it was part of the national identity. Every farmer in the country seemed to have one. Barry Crump, the rugged New Zealand icon, fronted the TV commercials and somehow perfectly embodied what those vehicles represented. Tough. Reliable. Built for whatever you threw at them. And we knew from experience that the reputation was earned.

So when Toyota made significant changes to the Hilux in the early 2000s, people in New Zealand noticed, and they weren't happy. The new models were having real issues out on farms. They weren't holding up the way the old ones had.

The easy response would have been to point the finger at the farmers. "That's not what it's designed for. You're misusing the product."

Toyota didn't do that.

Instead, they sent engineers to New Zealand to see what was actually happening in the field.

I know this part of the story because my brother-in-law was working at a Toyota dealership in the South Island at the time. He'd grown up on his family's farm in Southland, about as rugged and remote a part of New Zealand as you'll find. He took the engineers out there and showed them firsthand how Hiluxes were actually being used.

They were blown away. They genuinely had no idea.

And rather than going back to Japan and writing a policy about how customers should use their vehicles differently, they went back and reengineered them.

That's Kaizen in its purest form. Go to the source. Talk to the people living with the problem. Listen without defensiveness. And then make the improvement.

It's worth noting that the 80s and 90s Hiluxes, built during the era when the Kaizen philosophy was being embedded deeply into Toyota's culture, are still considered some of the toughest vehicles ever made. They're sought after to this day.

Toyota is now the world's largest carmaker. The Hilux and LandCruiser remain benchmark four-wheel drives, decade after decade. Not because Toyota got lucky. Because they built a culture of continuous improvement and never stopped.

One percent here. One percent there.

And eventually, that adds up to something remarkable, whether you're building vehicles, building teams, or building workplaces where people actually want to show up.

That's the lesson I keep coming back to. And it's the one I think is most worth sharing.