Lean Management and Human Resources: continuous improvement cannot be sustained by tools alone
Category: Development | Structure
Reading time: 9 minutes
A Lean initiative can improve workflows, reduce waiting times and make problems visible. But it loses consistency when an organisation retains managers who look for someone to blame, incentives that undermine collaboration or workloads that leave no time for improvement.
Between designing a better process and ensuring that it works every day lies an organisational dimension: the people who carry out the work, the managers who make decisions and the systems that define what is recognised, penalised or ignored.
This is where Lean Management and Human Resources meet.
Not because HR should take ownership of operational process management, but because any change to how work is performed ultimately affects responsibilities, skills, leadership, communication, participation and working conditions.
What is Lean Management?
Lean Management is a management approach focused on creating value, reducing waste and continuously improving processes. Although it originated in an industrial context and is closely associated with the Toyota Production System, academic literature documents the application of Lean across different sectors and processes.
Reducing waste, in this context, does not simply mean cutting costs or asking people to work faster. It means identifying activities that consume time, effort or resources without adding value to the final outcome.
Information recorded twice, an approval that waits several days, an unnecessary journey, an error that requires work to be repeated or a decision that always depends on the same person can all be forms of waste.
But recognising waste is only the beginning. Lean requires the ability to observe work as it actually happens, understand the causes of problems, test changes and learn from the results.
Why are Lean Management and Human Resources connected?
A systematic review of the human factors involved in Lean Management analysed 180 articles published in 48 journals and organised the implications for people management into eleven themes: training, leadership, culture, participation, the role of the Human Resources department, commitment, job design, teamwork, communication, impact on employees and resistance to change.
This diversity shows that research on Lean is not limited to processes and tools. It also covers leadership conditions, participation, work organisation and people management.
In practice, there are at least six areas where Human Resources can make a relevant contribution.
1. Prepare managers to lead improvement
An organisation does not develop a culture of continuous improvement simply by teaching teams a few tools.
Managers need to know how to observe the process, ask questions, distinguish symptoms from causes, create room for experimentation and support changes without looking for someone to blame whenever something fails.
When leaders respond to problems with criticism or an immediate search for those responsible, there is a greater risk that difficulties will be concealed, minimised or reported too late. A problem that is not reported can hardly be improved.
HR can support this transition by developing managers, defining expected leadership behaviours and incorporating those behaviours into assessment and development processes.
2. Involve the people who know the work
People who carry out an activity every day possess knowledge that is unlikely to appear in a flowchart designed away from the workplace.
Employee involvement should therefore not be limited to requesting suggestions after the solution has already been decided. It requires creating conditions in which people can identify problems, test alternatives and participate in evaluating the results.
A study published in 2025, focused on Lean manufacturing, combined a systematic literature review with validation by seven experts. The study identified 15 employee involvement practices. Among the most frequently mentioned were group decision-making, training and development, employee autonomy and empowerment, and management support.
HR’s role includes helping to create genuine participation mechanisms, with time, information and decision-making authority aligned with what is being asked of teams.
3. Develop problem-solving capabilities
Knowing the names of Lean tools does not mean knowing how to use them.
People need to learn how to observe, collect information, formulate hypotheses, test solutions and understand the impact of the changes made. This learning rarely happens through theoretical instruction alone.
Effective training should address the organisation’s specific problems and create room to experiment, discuss, make mistakes and try again. The aim is not only to provide answers, but to increase teams’ capacity to deal with future problems.
4. Align performance and recognition systems
An organisation may advocate collaboration while assessing individual results exclusively. It may ask for continuous improvement but penalise any attempt that does not produce immediate results. It may encourage people to identify problems while rewarding those who always present flawless indicators.
These inconsistencies undermine the credibility of the change.
HR should examine whether objectives, indicators, performance assessment and recognition systems support the necessary behaviours. Otherwise, the organisation’s formal message will conflict with what people learn is genuinely valued.
5. Review job design
Improving a process can change tasks, levels of autonomy, working pace, responsibilities and relationships between roles.
These changes require an analysis that goes beyond operational efficiency. It is necessary to determine whether people have the skills, resources, authority and time required to meet the demands of the new process.
It is also important to assess unintended consequences, such as work intensification, increased pressure, excessive loss of autonomy or the transfer of responsibilities without the corresponding resources.
6. Sustain change over time
A Lean initiative does not end when the new process has been designed.
It is necessary to monitor indicators, consolidate new routines, correct deviations and integrate learning into onboarding, training, communication and performance management processes.
Without continuity, the organisation is more likely to return to previous practices, particularly when urgent situations, leadership changes or pressure on results arise.
The risk of reducing Lean to “doing more with less”
There is an important difference between eliminating waste and intensifying work.
A literature review on Lean, the working environment, health and well-being included 11 studies with quantitative results. It found evidence of negative effects, particularly in low-complexity manual work contexts, but also examples of positive outcomes. The authors concluded that the relationship is not linear and may vary according to the Lean practice applied. They nevertheless noted that the available evidence remains limited regarding the influence of implementation strategy and the production context.
When Lean is presented solely as an efficiency or cost-reduction programme, it can become a set of tools used to increase pressure, remove resources or impose processes designed without the participation of those who carry them out.
This approach is not only problematic from a human perspective. It also weakens improvement itself by increasing the risk that problems will no longer be reported, operational knowledge will be ignored and change will be perceived as something done against teams.
In its current description of the Toyota Production System, Toyota states that the system is based on the idea of making work easier. It also states that improvement depends on the human capacity to identify abnormalities, learn and implement kaizen. The Toyota Way 2020 explicitly includes respect for people.
Respecting people does not mean avoiding high standards or accountability. It means establishing clear objectives, providing appropriate conditions, creating room for contribution and ensuring sufficient safety to make problems visible.
Eight questions that HR and leadership should ask
- Do people understand the problem that needs to be solved, or do they only know the proposed solution?
- Have the people who carry out the work participated in diagnosing the problem and designing the changes?
- Are managers prepared to guide problem-solving without looking for someone to blame?
- Do objectives and incentives support collaboration, or do they create competition between departments?
- Do teams have the time, skills and autonomy required to participate in improvement?
- Have the effects of the changes on workload, working pace and working conditions been assessed?
- Are there indicators that make it possible to monitor both operational results and the impact on people?
- Is the organisation prepared to maintain the new practices after the initial project has ended?
These questions do not replace a technical analysis of processes. They help ensure that the analysis considers the organisational system in which those processes operate.
This perspective is close to the one we develop in Why strong teams fail in poorly designed systems: when execution continually depends on additional effort, informal workarounds or key individuals, the problem should not be reduced to individual motivation.
Lean Management and Human Resources: a shared responsibility
Lean Management is neither an operations-only project nor an initiative that should be handed over to Human Resources.
It requires shared responsibility. Operational departments understand the processes and technical requirements. Teams understand the real work. Managers create the conditions for problems to be discussed and resolved. HR can help align skills, leadership, participation, job design, communication and performance systems.
When these dimensions are addressed together, continuous improvement no longer depends solely on tools or on a few particularly committed people. It becomes part of how the organisation observes, discusses and improves work.
Improving processes also requires developing people’s capacity to understand and transform them.
How can VAGAR help?
At VAGAR, we develop Organisational Development and Training programmes connected to specific challenges involving work organisation, leadership and performance.
In a Lean initiative, the starting point should not be limited to choosing tools. It is necessary to clarify the problem, the conditions required for implementation, the necessary skills and the roles of managers and teams.
When the context justifies it, we design Lean Management training programmes that combine rigorous content, practical cases, simulations and application to the organisation’s real challenges. Training becomes more than a presentation of concepts and begins supporting people’s capacity to observe, test and improve work.
If your organisation is preparing a Lean initiative, reviewing an ongoing implementation or looking for training tailored to its teams, an initial conversation can help identify what depends on the process and what requires intervention in how people are organised and managed.
Evidence base
Toyota Motor Corporation. Toyota Way 2020 / Toyota Code of Conduct.
Bouranta, N., Psomas, E., & Antony, J. (2022). Human factors involved in lean management: A systematic literature review. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 33(9–10), 1113–1145.
Danese, P., Manfè, V., & Romano, P. (2018). A systematic literature review on recent lean research: State-of-the-art and future directions. International Journal of Management Reviews, 20(2), 579–605.
Hasle, P., Bojesen, A., Jensen, P. L., & Bramming, P. (2012). Lean and the working environment: A review of the literature. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 32(7), 829–849.
Medeiros, N. C., Godinho Filho, M., Callefi, M. H. B. M., & Ganga, G. M. D. (2025). Employee involvement practices in lean manufacturing: A multi-method approach. International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 50(3), 330–351.
Lean Enterprise Institute. What is Lean?
Toyota Motor Corporation. Toyota Production System.
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