While hiring new employees is a big challenge facing manufacturing today, one thing that makes it worse is when current employees leave. According to a cost of turnover report done by Tooling U-SME, “voluntary turnover costs organizations hundreds of thousands and up to millions of dollars.” Obviously, this is an expensive problem that needs to be fixed. It starts with the employees. Motivated employees want to work harder at their current job instead of working to find a new job. Three great strategies to help motivate your employees are: talking to them, gamifying your shop, and giving them the best tools.
Talking to Them
Your employees want to feel like you care about them. One of the most powerful ways to build this bond is by talking to them. Having a review once a year is great, but it’s a good idea to check in with your employees more frequently to see what they want to get out of their job. Whatever their career goals, it’s important to check in with your employees so you can help them. While they’re working on their goals, it’s also important to acknowledge the good work they’re doing.
Telling your employees when they’re doing a good job makes them feel appreciated and makes them want to stay with your company. The hard part is being able to track when an employee did something that’s worth being praised. However, a good ERP system will help you track these things. For example, if you want to know who had the smallest percentage of scrapped material last week, an ERP system can trace that, and then you can tell that employee they did well.
Gamifying Your Shop
One other way to motivate your employees is by giving them a competition. We’re all familiar with how motivating it can be to beat a high score in a game. Turning that kind of competition to the shop floor can do great things for your employees’ motivation. You can track things like pieces good, or percentage of machine up-time. You may reward one person, a department, a shift, or the entire shop for beating a previous “high score.”
There are two things needed to make this work: rewards that your employees want, and an accurate way to track everyone’s “scores.” For the prizes, that will depend on your shop. For a reward, you could offer a bonus, more vacation days, a lunch out with the boss, or any other prize that your employees may want. Tracking everyone’s scores will be the easy part if you have a good ERP system. An ERP system can easily track just about any metric you want. All you have to do is pull up the report.
Giving them the Best Tools
There is nothing more frustrating than having the wrong tool for a job. If you need a hammer and you’re given a screwdriver, it’s not going to go well. This same principle applies throughout the shop. If your shop is trying to schedule jobs more accurately, it will be much easier with software that can automatically add up how long each step will take and can compare to similar jobs from the past.
In short, your shop will run more smoothly with ERP software. ERP software can do behind the scenes number crunching, automatic communication, and job routing in just a few clicks. You’ll only have to input numbers once and all of the outcomes will be accurate. By giving your employees the best tools, you’re ensuring they can do their jobs to the best of their ability and that they aren’t frustrated at work.
If you talk to your employees, gamify your shop, and provide your employees with the best tools, you’ll have a much more motivated workplace. Your employees will want to work there, and they won’t be looking for a job somewhere else. One of the best ways to get the information you need to motivate your employees is through a good ERP system. In addition to getting information from the floor, an ERP system can also make your shop run more smoothly, cutting down on everyone’s frustration. Interested in learning more? Read this blog post to see what else an ERP system can do for you.
