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Employee Retention Strategies in Manufacturing

employee job accountability supply chain How to Identify and Address Productivity Gaps Among Supply Chain Employees
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Employee Retention Strategies in Manufacturing

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If you work in manufacturing, it should be clear by now that there is a labor shortage. Not only that, but the problem isn’t going away anytime soon even though manufacturing jobs are offering higher pay and more flexible schedules than ever. 

Because of the labor shortage, factories are stressed and need talented employees. You may be wondering, though, if higher pay and flexible schedules aren’t bringing in more employees, what will? 

In the business world, those who are the quickest to adapt are the most likely to succeed. Below are some ways that you can adapt to the labor shortage problem in the manufacturing industry.

Improve your training program. 

If you haven’t audited your training program in a while, now would be a good time to do so. This audit can help you see what works and what doesn’t. Proactively looking for flaws in your current program will allow you to problem-solve and make things better — giving new employees the confidence they need to complete their work with excellence.

If your training program is confusing or leaves your new employees feeling lost, they are less likely to do well or even stay on the job. 

Improving your training program will help your new employees get up to speed more quickly and help with employee retention. Retaining all the talent you can in a competitive labor market is vital. 

Recognize your employees.

Working a manufacturing job should be more fulfilling than the melancholy feeling that can come from clocking in and clocking out day after day. People seek purpose and recognition, no matter what their job is. Employees who feel valued tend to remain at their jobs more than those who don’t.

A great way to make employees feel valued is to develop an employee recognition program early in the training process.

Make sure you not only recognize their achievements but listen to them and take their ideas to heart. Implementing their ideas will boost their self-worth, which can contribute to increased productivity in the future. 

Create a safe workplace. 

Some jobs are inherently dangerous and can make employees feel on edge, stressed, or worried. Your goal is to ensure your factory is as safe as possible. Constant safety checks and safety training should be routine in a factory. 

Word spreads fast, and if you run a factory where people often get injured, people will hear about it. Most importantly, potential employees will hear about it and will seek work elsewhere. 

One of the other perks of creating a safe workplace is that it shows your employees that you care about their well-being, which goes above and beyond any tangible thing you can give them. 

Make the switch to automation. 

Technology is moving fast, and you should be too. If there are tasks that can be done through automation, it’s probably time to start thinking about making the switch. 

Switching to automation doesn’t mean you will end up with a factory of robots. You’ll need people to run the automation and machines. Automation will allow for more efficiency and time management. You will need fewer people overall, and your employees won’t be stuck doing monotonous and repetitive tasks all day.

Reach out to a recruiting agency.

If you implement these solutions but are still having trouble, it could be time to partner with a CNC recruitment agency. There are many of these nationwide and they have access to entire networks of people and resources. The great thing about hiring recruitment help is that it can be as temporary as you want it to be, making the investment well worth your time and money. 

Taking the time to implement solutions that make your employees feel valuable will not only increase productivity but will make your employees want to stay. We all know what it’s like to dread a job or project. You wake up and everything seems hard because you know what is ahead of you. Imagine if a few small changes could impact how your employees view their work, their days, and even, their life. The investment is worth it. Trust us. 

Author’s Bio

Jenny Battershell is the director of marketing at Goodwin Recruiting, a full-service recruiting firm. Battershell spent nine years as Goodwin’s director of sales and four more as the marketing and client relations manager before moving into her current role. She currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio.

 

employee job accountability supply chain How to Identify and Address Productivity Gaps Among Supply Chain Employees
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5 Benefits Leaders Will See With A New Mindset About Employee Accountability 

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With consumers besieged by high inflation, soaring gas prices and rising interest rates, more businesses may start feeling the brunt of these economic pressures, which makes getting the best results they want out of their employees as important as ever.

But how can leaders hold their teams accountable in ways that drive performance without driving people away? After all, during the Great Resignation, droves of people left their jobs because they were unhappy with leadership and the work culture.

How leaders think about accountability is how leaders tend to do accountability. Accountability often is perceived as a negative word, but shifting the focus from “results first” to “relationships first” can benefit businesses and workers in the long run, says Jennifer T. Long (jennifertlong.com), a Certified Master Coach and ForbesBooks author of Own Up!: How To Hold People Accountable Without All The Drama.

“The cultural mindset around accountability is frequently associated with consequences and retribution and punishment,” Long says. “While results are what keeps a business viable and profitable, that approach doesn’t reflect how people are wired to be most productive, most innovative, and most willing to give discretionary effort.

“An accountability mindset change on the part of leaders is needed. An accountability conversation focusing primarily on business results removes the personal connection and fails to leverage the power of human effort. Taking a relationship-first perspective is far more effective than a results-first approach. The problem is convincing some managers and leaders that this is the case. And to drive accountability by putting relationships first means leaders must first take ownership of their own expectations and experiences and approach every conversation with curiosity, not judgment.”

Long says some benefits of adopting a relationships-first accountability mindset include:

  • Learning and growth. Rather than trying to fix people by focusing on their deficits, skills gaps and weaknesses, leaders focus instead on learning and growth. “We are already in an era of strengths-based development,” Long says. “Accountability is opportunity. Think of having accountability conversations as an easy, everyday launching point for ongoing change and development. A relationship-first approach to performance, with its emphasis on ownership and trust, yields employees who are much more willing to change and challenge themselves.”
  • Critical thinking and co-created problem solving. Another shift in mindset comes from valuing discovery around the performance problems your employees or peers may have, as well as the discovery in how to solve problems together. “The ability to ask questions that probe areas of concern as well as reveal how others think and make decisions is the heart of knowing and trusting others,” Long says.
  • Being reflective and clear. “When you approach accountability from a place of clarity, you stop making assumptions,” Long says. “You reflect on your real expectations, and you inquire about what’s actually driving your employees’ behaviors.” Too many managers, she says, in trying to solve problems quickly make assumptions about why things are happening and about the intentions and abilities of others.
  • Ownership and solution-building. Shame and blame, Long says, come from a place of fear, and some work cultures tolerate these behaviors “as if they were the only solutions to performance problems.” And when people don’t trust company leadership or other divisions of the company, they operate from what she calls a place of self-protection. “By contrast,” Long says, “empowerment and engagement come when you can easily address your own choices as well as an employee’s or teammate’s choices without fear, anxiety or drama.”
  • Continuous and daily practice. “Accountability is a way of being, not a tool to leverage only in times of crisis,” Long says. “When we are accountable for all our choices, behaviors and results, we become empowered human beings who are learning, changing and growing together. “Continuous and daily practice of accountablity makes the moments of failure far fewer and less damaging, and transforms those moments into opportunities for growth and change.”

Long says if you’re going to do accountability well, leaders must be able to do it well when the chips are down.

“If leaders don’t shift their mindset, they’re likely to default to old behavioral tendencies when operating at speed and under pressure,” she says. “The trick is to replace those outdated and oft-negative tendencies with productive ones that bring out the best in everyone.”

 About Jennifer T. Long

 Jennifer T. Long (www.jennifertlong.com) is a Certified Master Coach and the ForbesBooks author of Own Up!: How To Hold People Accountable Without All The Drama. Also a Master Trainer, Long is the CEO of Management Possible, a leadership development company providing coaching for leaders and managers across various disciplines. She hosts the Organizational Transformation Kung Fu podcast with Sandi Verrecchia at www.otkungfu.com. Along with her nearly four decades working with leaders, Long spent 10 years as a theater director, an experience that helped inform her methodology – elevating the idea that conversation and relationships are the prime movers of impact and culture.

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The Great Resignation: What Organizations Must Learn

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With a near-record 11 million job openings across the US, new research finds that prospective employees prioritize well-being benefits ­­— including financial, mental, emotional, social, physical, and career perks. The Great Resignation, as it has been called, has left employers scrambling to figure out new ways to turn the tide of departing talent.

In our own ongoing research, we have surveyed almost 3,000 professionals in our Resilient Leader Assessment (resiliencerank.com). This research points to reasons why so many people left their jobs in the Great Resignation, and ways companies can respond to turn the challenge into an opportunity.

The growth opportunity is to understand at a deeper level why people are leaving, to gain a better understanding of your workplace and your workers, and to leverage the change that’s occurring for your company’s growth.

There are many reasons large numbers of people have left their jobs since the pandemic began. Burnout and exhaustion are commonly cited as reasons medical and other frontline workers have quit their jobs in the pandemic. But what about the countless other employees who have left professional positions that don’t necessarily involve saving lives, directly serving the public, or working in hazardous conditions?

Our research points to another reason people have been resigning: They are seeking to fill a gap between what they say is most important in their lives, and how they are actually allocating their time and energy.

Our assessment is a proprietary 16-question tool designed to gauge the resiliency level of participants. We ask participants to rank their level of agreement or disagreement with a number of statements. Based on the answers, we provide a resiliency rank in each of four areas: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual resilience. We then aggregate those scores to identify trends.

For the statement, “I’m engaged in a livelihood that is in line with my core values and beliefs,” the aggregate score has run surprisingly high (85), putting our participants in what we consider the “green zone” on this measure. However, there is also broad agreement with this statement: “There are significant gaps between what I say is most important in my life and how I actually allocate my time and energy.” That put our participants in the “red zone” with an aggregate score around 55. Their score for the statement “I don’t invest enough time and energy in making a positive difference to others or to the world” is also in the red at 59.

The news is a constant drumbeat of all that is wrong with the world. It’s only natural for compassionate, empathetic, self-aware human beings to ask themselves “What am I doing about it?”

These results support a common narrative around the Great Resignation ­— that the pandemic is causing people to reevaluate what is most important in their lives. This is good for individuals, but it creates a challenge for organizations losing experienced and talented employees, managers, and top-level leaders.

The growth opportunity in this moment is to understand at a deeper level why people are resigning in order to gain a deeper understanding of your workplace and of your talent. This will make your organization, your culture, and your ability to retain talent stronger and more resilient. But what does resilient really mean?

We define resilience as how we recharge, and leverage change and uncertainty as catalysts for growth. But resilience in corporate culture has traditionally meant something else entirely: being able to endure more than the competition, work longer hours, burn the candle at both ends, take whatever hits come your way, and keep going. That’s not how you develop long-term resilience, performance, engagement, or loyalty. It’s how you burn people out.

Stress and strategy are mutually exclusive. You can’t think creatively when you’re under stress. When you’re tired, you’re toast. When your workforce is too exhausted to deal with ever-present change, they’re either going to perform in a mediocre way or they’re going to get so frustrated that they’re going to leave.

The news of the Great Resignation is organizations have burned people out. For too long they have not cared about the exhaustion of their employees, and whether those employees are spending time on what is important to them versus what they’re being paid to do.

It’s time to change that. Here are a few ways to do it.

Model Transparency for Transformation: In many work cultures, people are not willing to speak honestly about the stress they are under or ask for help. Leaders can change that by speaking truthfully and transparently and listening to their employees’ challenges and needs. Organizations that are open to listening to what’s really going on within the company will learn what they need to be able to help their people become more resilient.

Build Recovery Rituals: There are simple practices anyone can do to recharge. Recovery in the typical workday is just a series of state changes that you are consciously crafting and executing so you can toggle back and forth between being on, with full focus and creativity and everything you’ve got to do for your work, and being off, truly at rest.

Create a Culture of Resilience: How can we operationalize the concept of resilience going forward? It can’t just be words. It has to be tangible, this commitment to our employees’ well-being. We must be willing to make mistakes and to get feedback. We have to genuinely be interested in listening and learning so that we can try something new and find out what works.

Practice “Pause-Ask-Choose”: We developed this strategy to help leaders build resilience within themselves and their organizations.

-What do you do when you’re in an uncontrollable rip tide of rapid change? You stop fighting. Yes, that’s counterintuitive, but pausing will give you an awareness of how much energy you’re expending and how little it’s getting you. It’s a time to literally catch your breath so you can reframe whatever challenge you face.

-This is the chance to discover deeper meaning in the challenge you’re facing by asking questions such as “What is the creative opportunity presented by what is happening?” and “What am I not seeing?” In this way, you begin to reframe what is happening so you can ride the wave of change instead of fighting it.

-This is deciding how we will act based on what we’ve discovered by pausing and asking. We may choose to act or not to act and instead recharge for the time when action will make sense. This might include consciously ritualizing small, daily practices for our personal recovery to create mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual harmony and resilience.

The Great Resignation is just one of the challenges business leaders face in this time of massive and unrelenting change. Now’s the time to be thinking about how you’re going to take care of the people who are staying, the new people you will attract, and even the people who will come back. Instead of looking over their people, leaders must learn to look after them.

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About Adam: Best-selling author, keynote speaker, and resilience expert Adam Markel inspires leaders to master the challenges of massive disruption in his upcoming book, “Change-Proof — Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Build Long-Term Resilience” (McGraw-Hill, February 2022). Adam is author of the #1 Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publisher’s Weekly best-seller, “Pivot: The Art & Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life.” Learn more at AdamMarkel.com.