Developing Employee Engagement Strategies for Manufacturing

Today’s manufacturing workforces are becoming more diverse than ever. To be successful, you must be able to compete in the global marketplace. This can be to your advantage if you know the right manufacturing employment engagement strategies for a multi-generational, multi-national, multi-cultural work force.

Manufacturing Employee Engagement Activities:

• Feedback Sessions – More and more studies show that making employees feel valued in the company is the most important factor in employee engagement. An employee who feels like they have some control over their job, like their ideas and concerns are being heard and like the success of the company is in part their own personal success is much more likely to be committed, engaged, long-term employees than ones who do not have this sense of belonging.   This feeling of being valued and heard is more important even than traditional perks like raises and extra vacation time. Scheduling time to hear from employees and making sure they feel heard — rather than that their ideas are going to disappear into a suggestion box never to be seen again — can be a great step toward improving engagement across different locations, cultures and age groups.

• Training and Development Opportunities – Another great activity for engaging a wide variety of employee types is by offering continuing training and development opportunities. Continuing education in your industry not only makes your employees feel more invested in your company and your business, but it gives your employees more common ground. Best of all, it makes your employees more highly skilled workers, which can improve the quality and efficiency of your manufacturing.

• Consistent Evaluations – Another way that employees can feel more engaged is when they feel like they are the right fit for the position they are in. Whether it’s in a position of leadership or another area, the more your employee’s goals and talents match up with the job they are doing, the more engaged they are likely to be and the more effective they are likely to be for the organization. Be sure to have a dedicated system of monitoring your employees to see where they can excel so that you can direct their talents in the right way.

General Manufacturing Employee Engagement Tips

Workers, even in manufacturing, have a greater sense of autonomy than ever before. As technology takes over many of the menial, repetitive tasks that manufacturing requires, workers are much less content to be cogs in a machine. They want to be the drivers of that machine.

Threading that balance between letting your workers explore that autonomy and keeping them focused on the tasks you need them to perform is where you will develop successful engagement practices.