Below are some ideas on how to motivate your production team. How can they get motivated and excited to do their best:
Keeping employees motivated should be one of your priorities as the manager of the production team. Why? Because it increases the number of goods produced and decreases downtime and the recurrence of quality control issues. Motivated employees are more likely to remain with a company in the long run. This lowers the costs of recruiting and training new employees while also preventing burnout.
But keeping your production team motivated is a difficult task. They might not be as engaged and productive and even struggle to stay on track and meet their goals every day.
Address and Fulfill Their Needs
According to Abraham Maslow, if you meet workers’ physiological, safety, social, self-esteem, and self-fulfillment needs, they will produce more and stay happier. These are some physiological needs to take care of:
- Food
- Safety
- Employment stability
- Salary levels
- Healthy and safe work environment
- Predictability of management decisions
- Clear and define goals
- Positive work environment
While long-term employment contracts, a high hourly wage, and respect for the supervisor are crucial motivators, standard salaries and benefits are not enough to keep employees working hard. Once a certain level of income is reached, other needs such as social needs, self-esteem, and self-accomplishment become more important. Using such motivators will pay off as employee retention falls and employees begin to see company goals as their own. Add motivational tools like incentives, and team-building, and involve employees in the business to achieve a strong motivation to work harder.
Address Their Higher Needs
Self-esteem and self-actualization stand out as you progress through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The first is the desire to feel good about yourself and valued by others; that is, to believe that others have recognized your accomplishments and contributions. The second refers to a sense of fulfillment or living up to your full potential. Work in a production company involves, at least in part, teamwork and social interactions. The desire to belong and be a part of a group is extremely important. Employee interactions have been shown to improve workplace performance. That is why team building is essential.
Communicative managers, a break room, and occasional employee outings such as family picnics can all help to meet social needs. Recognition in employee-of-the-month clubs and awards can boost self-esteem. Encourage self-actualization by promoting deserving employees. Employees produce more when managers express appreciation and recognition for them as individuals, and when they work with one another as a team.
Maintain Effective Communication
Maintain open lines of communication with your production line employees. Encourage employees to express their concerns or questions. Furthermore, maintain accessibility to ensure any performance issues are addressed before they worsen.
Meet with your production line workers regularly. You can set up one-on-one and team meetings with employees. Each meeting allows you to learn how your employee feels about their performance. You can also use these meetings to brainstorm ways to help your production line employees.
Don’t forget to conduct ongoing performance evaluations as well. You can use these reviews to explain how you believe an employee is performing. Each review provides an opportunity to assist an employee in performing their best.
Automate Routine Tasks
Allow your production line workers to concentrate solely on high-value tasks. To do so, you must first identify and automate repetitive tasks.
It is helpful to ask for feedback from production line workers. Use surveys and questionnaires to learn how these employees feel about their jobs and the work they do. Then you can collect data that can be used to automate various tasks for production line workers.
You can use automation tools and software to streamline your operations. Following that, your production line workers can devote their time to high-value tasks. And they can feel good about doing meaningful work that contributes to the success of your company.
Provide On-the-Job Training and Skill Development
Provide opportunities for advancement to production line workers. For example, you could provide training programs to help factory workers advance their careers with your company. These programs allow factory workers to improve their current skills or learn new ones.
You can also offer to pay for courses at a college or university, online workshops, or certification programs. This allows you to assist production line workers in receiving the necessary training. Furthermore, it can assist you in increasing employee satisfaction and retention rates.
Find New Methods to Enhance Efficiency and Save Time
A factory worker may spend up to three hours per week looking for information that will help them do their job. It drains motivation more quickly than almost anything else. For decades, factory workers had no easy way of finding, sorting, and storing information and resources required for their jobs. Consider this: every time a line worker has a question, he or she must seek out the one other person on the shop floor who knows the answer. Most traditional forms of information sharing for manufacturers were difficult to scale and standardize. Employees were frequently required to rely on nearby coworkers for guidance and knowledge transfer.
By arming employees with the knowledge they need to do their jobs faster, better, and safer, the morale of your production team will rise, and motivation to do their best will follow.
Motivate Production Workers Using the Deming Cycle
American engineer, William Edwards Deming, greatly emphasized the quality of products. Managers should optimize production to reduce the number of errors, improve quality, and reduce waste and complaints. It is possible to avoid costly mistakes and stress when workers have clear information about how to work when the order is due, and so on. The communication and workflow are both smooth.
Start the learning process: introduce new software, training, varying tasks, and so on. Differentiation helps workers maintain a higher level of productivity than the monotony of repetition. It leads to fewer complaints and employees focusing on achieving goals, allowing for new ideas in processes and procedures, and for management to demonstrate to workers that they value the input of production workers. It is a pleasure to work in an environment where there is a clear work schedule and the boss motivates rather than changes their mind about orders, tasks, and priorities every two minutes. The amount of unnecessary stress is limited.
The Ending Note
These are some of the tried and tested ways to motivate your production team. Working with your production team will also help you find out more ways you can increase motivation for everyone in the company.