Improving employee engagement within manufacturing is a global concern. A recent Gallup study found employee engagement is at an 11-year low; only 30% considered themselves involved and enthusiastic about work, which is worse than it was in the “quiet quitting” phase of COVID-19.

Even those who consider employee engagement too soft a measure by itself recognize the dire correlation that low engagement has with decreasing quality, customer satisfaction and profits. Reasons for low engagement include:

• Feeling a lack of purpose and meaning
• Receiving insufficient recognition for creative problem-solving
• Frustration about abundant resource constraints
• Isolation from a perception of poor communication

Companies often struggle with getting constructive insights about how their staff and frontline workers feel. Even when managers and human resources teams utilize pulse surveys – and many don’t – employees can be concerned about the true anonymity of such questionnaires and can be reluctant to share frustrations. Exit interviews always fail to recapture individual employees and still may not give you a full picture of employee experience.

Contrary to headlines about lazy generations, most people want to enjoy their job and be good at it. Motivation is lost when they feel overworked, unsupported or frustrated. This can result in workers seeking other opportunities, contributing to the cycle of high work and low morale for the remaining staff. 

This concern is significant, particularly because of the ongoing labor shortage. Manufacturing companies are struggling to fill over 600,000 jobs. Unsatisfied workers typically have alternative job prospects and are attracted to the surface-level flexibility of the gig economy.

Furthermore, when manufacturers finally hire replacements the onboarding process can be long. Sourcing and training new team members is expensive and time-consuming. As a result, manufacturers need to consider employee retention as a priority.

The good news is creating a more engaged and motivated workforce is possible. By prioritizing a worker-centric approach, manufacturers can foster collaboration, motivation and workforce engagement.

Here are 6 steps to consider for your employee engagement strategy.

1. Make Engagement Effortless

Increasing employee engagement is important at all levels of an organization. According to Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace, highly engaged teams have fewer negative outcomes (like 30% fewer quality defects) and more positive outcomes (like 10% higher customer loyalty). Engaged workers also drive better products, services, and innovation, growing the bottom line.

For your top floor to keep a consistent pulse on shop floor engagement both the inputs and analysis have to be natural. Forcing extra checkpoints for the sake of engagement will have a neutral effect at best, and could easily backfire. And the best collection of data will be ignored by leaders when summaries are cumbersome.   

2. Empower Effective Communication

Effective communication among and across employees and management should be a priority. Common approaches include:

• Quick daily huddles that define the day’s goals and illuminate potential challenges
• Group messaging that is contextual to task-relevant information 
• Highly visible status boards that balance regular updates with focused work

Consider different communication channels. Face-to-face interaction often feels authentic and modern connected workforce solutions can provide video calls with AI-enabled translation services for unprecedented access across your organization. This is increasingly important as hiring pools can expand by many factors when language isn’t a barrier.

3. Encourage Innovation

Everyone within an organization has the potential to contribute to process improvement. Michael Ochi, Director of Product Marketing at QAD, recalls a memory from a prior job at a medical device manufacturer, 

“When I was an industrial engineer I quickly realized that the best way to implement change was to ask the people it would impact most: my shop floor workers. I recall a mechanical engineer wanted to solve a quality issue with a new assembly fixture. He asked me to introduce it to the floor and instead of saying ‘Here’s your new fixture’ (which would have been met with resistance) I asked ‘How would you improve this prototype we’re rolling out to solve issue X?’. The assembly people suggested that the securing mechanism needed to be spring-loaded and have one tightening bolt rather than two. Including their feedback resulted in several seconds shaved off the operation, better ergonomics, more consistent placement, and zero-resistance adoption. Everybody won.” 

The lesson here is that innovation isn’t a top-down exercise. Beyond Michael’s experience, data supports creating an open forum for continuous improvement: 38% of employees feel they lack incentive when management dismisses their ideas.

Most workers desire to contribute to company growth. Rather than being responsible for all good ideas, management should create an environment of shared input and action. A good way of navigating the challenge of needing justification for change is to build it into the feedback process. It’s easy to have check-boxes at the bottom of an ideas form that say:

This will improve:

Simple suggestions from the frontline can have significant efficiency improvements and prevent downtime. This leads to noticeable business improvements and increased employee satisfaction. Incentivize your workers by holding digital or in-person town halls and smaller team meetings.

Create an environment that inspires, motivates, and assures long-term commitment from team members.

4. Define Career Paths

Upskilling your current frontline workers helps them learn and develop. It also provides career progression opportunities, which is important for worker retention. Consider which skills and leading initiatives your team needs. You could cross-train your teams and create a multi-skilled learning organization.

It’s important to note that everybody, from entry-level to executive, can be sensitive to promotions with a poor pay-to-pressure ratio (small wage increase with big responsibilities). Considering the value that career development brings to your organization will foster better outcomes for your company, and make it easier to quantify compensation steps. A company culture that encourages cross-training and career progression makes it easier to retain critical staff.

5. Promote When Possible

Giving employees the tools needed to upskill makes it easier to identify and promote from within.

In addition to personal motivation and loyalty, this has three benefits to the company:

• Increased productivity
• Enhanced group knowledge
• Improved customer familiarity and loyalty

A positive employee experience strengthens the emotional connection to their job. This leads to a 17% increase in productivity and a 59% decrease in employee turnover in the long term.  

6. Create a Culture of Celebration

Your workplace culture should celebrate employees’ achievements. These come in different forms, from milestone anniversaries to team recognition for meeting/exceeding goals and individual recognition for exceptional commitment to company values. When employee achievements go unnoticed their incentives disappear along with incentive-worthy actions.

When your workers have good ideas, it’s important that you acknowledge them. This fosters a positive work environment and motivates engagement. Workers feel seen and appreciated.

Use Connected Worker Technology as an Ally

Engagement starts and ends with employees but the deployment of technology can significantly influence the success of engagement programs, which impact real business metrics. QAD Redzone was created by plant managers with the sole purpose of delivering miraculous manufacturing outcomes by revolutionizing employee engagement. That’s why the user community and analysts agree that QAD Redzone is the #1 Connected Workforce solution. QAD has benchmarked over 1,000 plants and found that Redzone delivers, on average a:

• 29% boost in productivity
• 74% increase in employee engagement
• 32% decrease in staff turnover

Transform your manufacturing company and create a workplace that engages and retains employees. Tap into hidden capacity, reduce employee turnover while increasing productivity through QAD Redzone.

For a limited time, QAD is freely* delivering these difference-making results to customers who upgrade their QAD ERP to the Cloud. Learn more here.

* Free with ELEVATE upgrade. Valid through 12/31/2024. See Program Details Here.