The secret of success

During the past few years, the economic recession has enormous effect on businesses. Many big and strongly-financed corporations were suffered severe losses and had to declare bankrupt.

Automakers have also been affected badly by the spreading financial crisis which caused the sharp decrease in demand, and led to the industry’s big losses. While other big corporations like GM or Ford laid off their workers to cut costs, Toyota went the opposite way as what Toyota plans for is long-term development, it does not lay off workers when things go down, and tries to give long-term security jobs for their staff. The estimated costs of keeping their workers when sales is really significant to the company at that time, however, according to Toyota, human resources is their most valuable asset which takes times and money to build up. Instead, in order to survive through this hard time, the company chose to downsize its scale and halt all of the expanding plans. On the other hand, the company also asked their employees to share the difficulty with the company by accepting lower benefits, reduced bonus, and lower other kinds of their current interests at least until the condition get better.
In fact, the negative effect of the financial crisis is just a short-term issue whereas the investment in human resources is a long-term investment which will bring back unimaginable long-term benefits. By keeping the current well trained workforce, Toyota is always ready to return to its full production with all the well trained workers when the crisis is over. Moreover, Toyota’s move also makes its workers feel grateful and be more loyal to the company which did not turn the back on them in their most difficult time. And in return, they will devote more of their time, their skills, and knowledge to the company. With such highly trained and motivated workforce, Toyota can develop more and more.