You may feel that your relationship with your employees is actually very good and that you support them, and in turn, they support you. However, it can be totally and utterly frustrating when you feel that your workforce is letting you and your business down. But as with many things, this can often be a two-way issue.
You may feel that as you are giving your employees their job that they should bend over backward to please you, but this is rarely the case nowadays. Treating your employees right can be the difference between getting an order out to the customer late and incurring penalties or getting the order out the door on time.
If employees’ morale is down, it is more than likely that production has started to slow down, too. This is not a conscious effort on your employees’ part, but nor does it happen when morale is high and work of higher quality flies out the door.
The best thing to do is to try and keep your employees happy. This does not take as much effort on your part as you may think. Here are a few ideas.
#1 Make your employees feel appreciated
Giving them little perks if they do well or get orders out on time with little or no rework can be very beneficial to your business as well as making your employees feel appreciated. This can also be good for business if the perks are given by the team rather than the whole company as it will entice team workers to work better and harder than other teams to get the reward.
Just saying thank you at the end of each week can go a long way. However, giving financial bonuses at regular stages throughout the year when targets have been met can be a big thank you. Or company dos such as a BBQ in the summer, as well as a Christmas dance, can help give your employees something to think about and plan among themselves.
#2 Keeping your employees health in mind
Let them know that you are looking out for their health. Make sure to give them all manual handling training and give them as little need to carry items as possible. Maybe installing a conveyor belt system to carry work around your building and minimize any hand-to-hand product movement could be a good idea. Look at fluentconveyors.com for more information.
#3 Keeping all your employees well informed
Make sure to keep all employees well informed. Having meetings with managers about the workload, successes, and failures but not passing any of the information on to the workers on the shop floor or anyone in between is detrimental to your business and will actually create a ‘them and us’ scenario.
This is very bad for employee morale. However, information which is passed down from managers to team leaders or supervisors and then to the working teams is very good for morale, so all staff knows what has been talked about, such as the highs and lows of the order books and any concerns or problems. It lets ideas, comments, or grievances be heard, and nobody ends up feeling like they are too low to know.
