A recent study conducted by “TTi Global Research” which canvassed employees across 11 industry sectors, revealed that employees in the manufacturing industry showed the lowest levels of engagement and satisfaction in their job role.
Why are employee engagement and satisfaction important in the manufacturing industry?
In a nutshell, happy people tend to be better workers. This will increase their motivation and boost their productivity, which means a lower turnover and higher profitability for your company. If you want to dig deeper into this, read our article about the importance of employee satisfaction in the workplace.
3 tips to improve employee satisfaction in manufacturing companies:
Listen to all your employees: It may seem obvious or evident to you, but it’s extremely important that every single employee feels that they have a way to express themselves in the company. From the CEO to the factory worker, feeling included and listened to is the number one thing that makes employees engaged.
The best way to know if your employees are happy? ask them directly. The biggest challenge in the manufacturing industry, especially when it comes to big companies, is that the teams are distributed across the HQ, the factories, the agencies…
Sometimes it can get difficult to reach out to everyone. Luckily for you, we are in the digital age and the internet is here to save your day. Feedback and survey tools will make your life easier. All you have to do is create a feedback form and send it out to your employees via email or SMS campaigns.
Feedier offers free ready-to-use templates made by our expert specifically to measure employee satisfaction.
- Pro tip: Choose a software that makes it possible for you to make the experience as human as possible so that the feedback form doesn’t feel like an administrative task. Make it fun and light, add GIFs, images and try to limit to 10 questions maximum.
Understand your employees:
Now that you collected the employees’ answers, they have to be analyzed. This step will help you uncover what makes your employees happy and what they want to be changed or improved. Work on those changes and improve your company’s work environment.
- Pro Tip #1 – Use text questions as less as possible because they are hard to visualize and drop your completion rate. Prefer options, smileys, and ratings question types that can be easily visualized with graphics.
- Pro Tip #2 – Always pay attention to the context (hiring date, department, office location, manager…), it brings key information and makes data a lot more reliable.
It is important to use a platform that allows you to dig deeper into the collected data by providing you with detailed statistics and charts. For example, Feedier comes with extended reporting tools including pie charts, bar graphs, advanced filters, tags, keyword managers, and Excel exports..
You can also get a complete summary report of all your collected data in one single PDF that you can generate per department, form, time period, user…
Don’t stop there!
It’s true that asking your employees for their Feedback makes them feel valued and heard, but you can’t stop there. Human interactions are actually priceless. So try to approach them and have a one-on-one meeting with every one of them.
Managers in manufacturing companies should take time to talk to their employees and to thank them for their valuable input. After answering the feedback form, the employee should be more open to discussing the reasons behind their responses.
Taking steps to engage with them to find out how things can be made better can only enhance their motivation and, thus, their productivity.
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