You may have missed this story by my colleague Jonathan Soble in Tokyo last week. The basic thrust of it is that employee representatives at Toyota had informed senior management in 2006 that they were concerned about falling quality at the company. “We fear that processes vital to safe automaking have been cast aside in the name of competitiveness,” one union leader said.
It is true that this leader came from the “All Toyota Labour Union”, a break-away from the more established in-house union. But this story tells us two things. First, listening to employees (consultation) may take time but can save you from greater problems in due course. And second, staff associations or “approved” unions, while more polite and restrained, may not give you the independent feedback managers sometimes need.
Last month I wrote in this blog: “I expect that, down on the production line, Toyota employees could see exactly what was going on. That is the Toyota way.”
I am glad that, in this sense at least, my faith in the company has been confirmed.
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Lucy Kellaway, FT columnist and associate editor, offers her solution to your workplace problems in a column in the Financial Times. In the 
