What steps to take as an entrepreneur to provide motivation for better production to the direct workers in your factory?
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Answer:
As team leaders, production managers have the essential responsibility of understanding how to manage factory production. While there are countless corporate cheerleading tactics that motivate office workers, finding the right strategy to get frontline manufacturing workers fired up and excited is more difficult.
How to Run a Factory: Connecting Your Workforce
For years, frontline manufacturing workers on the shop floor have been disconnected from the rest of the organization. This really isn’t all that surprising considering 70% of the workforce in America is disconnected at work.
But the disconnect is particularly bad in the manufacturing industry. According to an article in Forbes,
“The transportation, manufacturing, and production fields have the greatest percentage of workers who are most unhappy on the job.”
– Susan Adams, Forbes Staff
A disconnected manufacturing workforce is a problem for several reasons.
Creates higher turnover rates
Lowers overall productivity
Makes day-to-day life harder for workers
Creates more opportunities for work-related safety incidents
This is exactly why more manufacturing companies are finding new ways of managing a production team. They’re now looking to connect their entire workforce and provide a single source of truth for information to their frontline workers. It’s good for production. It’s good for the employees. And it’s good for morale.
Here are five ways to motivate your factory workers and get your production line running like a well-oiled machine:
1. Encourage Bottom-Up Communication (and learn from it)
Most manufacturing companies only have a top-down internal communication strategy, meaning management can send information to employees, but the information doesn’t flow back up the corporate ladder.
Operational communication is like a pyramid. At the top you have official announcements and mandates that cascade down to the rest of the organization. In the middle, there is the team and department communication. This is where work is often coordinated and delegated across functions of the organization. Finally you have 1:1 and small group communication (hint: this is also where most of the knowledge transfer happens in manufacturing). At the base of the communication pyramid is where the actual work gets done.
This where your factory workers are coming together to solve problems, overcome operational challenges, and learn from each other to improve their skills.
There is a wealth of knowledge at the base of the pyramid. This is where your operations managers can gain true insight into the day-to-day operations of the business. Solving lots of small problems has far greater impact than fixing a few large ones. Make sure that the organization is encouraging bottom-up communication in order to leverage that oh-so-valuable institutional knowledge.
See how Seaboard Foods, a manufacturing company with more than 5,000 employees across six states, uses Beekeeper to increase operational efficiency and facilitate two-way communication.
2. Find New Ways to Streamline Processes and Save Time
A frontline worker can spend up to 3 hours per week looking for the information they need to do their job.
Now that’s demoralizing. It crushes motivation (and the soul) faster than almost anything else.
For decades frontline manufacturing workers had no easy way to find, sort, and store information and resources they needed for their jobs. Imagine every time that a line worker has a question, that person has to hunt down the one other person on the shop floor who knows the answer.
Most traditional forms of information sharing for manufacturers was hard to scale and difficult to standardize. Employees often had to rely on nearby co-workers for guidance and knowledge transfer.
But now, more and more manufacturers are moving towards mobile-friendly digital workplaces.
With a tool like Beekeeper, frontline manufacturing employees can:
Check shift schedules right into their preferred language
Access a mobile-friendly document library which gives them 24/7 access to all the SOPs, training materials,