What if your employees were as committed to their jobs as they were to their life outside of the plant? What difference would that make to your company?
You may have heard the numbers: manufacturing employees who are engaged are 70% more productive. They have a higher safety record, lower turnover, greater customer satisfaction, and higher profitability.
We know this, yet we’re still struggling to figure out exactly what we need to do to engage our workers. Here are five tips to get you started.
- Acknowledge the good work your employees do. Your workers are in it for more than a paycheck, and they will work even harder when they know you sincerely appreciate the effort, skill, and ability they bring to the table.
- Invest in professional development. By offering training programs, mentoring, coaching, and cross-training, you’ll make sure you have the most talented and capable people working for you.
To sum up these first two ideas, Richard Branson once said to “Train your employees well enough so they could leave, but treat them well enough so that they don’t want to.”
- Get to know your employees. Create opportunities both inside and outside the workplace for employees to socialize and build relationships with each other. It’s true, people who play together, stay together.
- 4. Empower your employees to be creative and to innovate in their job. This decision to empower may also entail being okay with failure from time to time, but create a safe environment for workers to develop new ideas, processes, and prototypes.
- Sincerely care for your people. When you hire the right people, and you care about them as individuals, you will make a huge difference. Be real, authentic, and approachable, and your employees will give the same honesty and sincerity back to you.
It doesn’t take a lot of time or money to engage your team members. Implement just one or two of these ideas, and make a commitment to see them through and in return, you will retain your top talent and have a stronger bottom line.
If you’d like to receive my 7-video series, “The Seven Mistakes Managers Make to Crush Company Culture” please send an email to lisa@grategy.com with the subject line “Seven Mistakes Video Series.”
