The Good Jobs Strategy, or GJS — an approach to improving productivity and customer satisfaction in retail and other service industries — works. But the system, which involves paying frontline workers more, providing them with predictable schedules, offering them career opportunities, and supporting them with a specific operations model, is not easy to implement. There haven’t been hundreds of GJS transformations to learn from, but there have been hundreds of implementations of the Toyota Production System (TPS), and they can help us learn how to change an operation.
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The GJS Can Take Lessons from TPS
Implementing the Good Jobs Strategy requires huge changes. But there is a precedent to learn from: the Toyota Production System.
December 11, 2017
· Long read
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JB Jamie Bonini is a vice president of the Toyota Production System Support Center, a not-for-profit organization affiliated with Toyota Motor North America that since 1992 has helped other organizations adopt the Toyota Production System. -
Sarah Kalloch is executive director of the Good Jobs Institute, a nonprofit whose mission is to help companies thrive by providing good jobs. Follow her on twitter at @sarahkalloch.
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Zeynep Ton is a professor of the practice at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a cofounder and the president of the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute. She is the author of The Good Jobs Strategy and The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay and Meaning to Everyone’s Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023).
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