Underutilization of workers: an analysis according to the lean management philosophy in basic education

Abstract

One of the eight wastes that Lean production, inspired by the Toyota Production System, proposes to study is the underutilization of workers, that is, the inadequate use of their intelligence. The sense is to provide listening and participation in improvement projects, of professionals who have experience in daily life and, in many cases, consistent academic qualifications.  The objective of this work is to study the importance of the participation of teachers and employees of a basic education school in the construction of new routines and work methods, in the context of the Lean management philosophy, justified by the scarcity of scientific literature on the subject. Brazil has about 184,000 basic education schools with one million four hundred thousand teachers working from kindergarten to the ninth grade of elementary school, and of these, 83.2% have a college degree, a percentage that grows every year. About the schools, 21.7% are private, 61.3% municipal, 16.6% state, and 0.4% are federal schools. As a research methodology, a systematic review of the literature was adopted, based on the PRISMA protocol, allowing the identification of 53 records, 14 of which were included in the literature review, due to their adherence to the researched subject. The main contribution of this paper is the identification of a research gap involving the underutilization of workers and adoption of the Lean management philosophy in the education sector, as well as a conceptual proposal of the positive impact on the educational organization results by not underutilizing workers, without wasting their intelligence.