Let’s talk about the 5S audit, a mechanism many companies use as their major means to stimulate employee creativity and trigger continuous improvement. 

There are three fundamentals of the 5S audit. 

First: It is an audit and therefore has limited capability for stimulating anything but compliance, even though many companies use the 5S audit as an employee engagement tool.

Second: Many companies implementing 5S do so incompletely. As a result, there is very little to audit—except usually a version of S1, S2, and S3—get rid of the junk, clean what’s left, and make it neat and orderly. (Some companies then move on to standardize these tasks—but one wonders to what end.)

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