Manufacturers flourish and grow when their frontline employees have the right tools, motivation, and confidence to make decisions on their own, complete even the most difficult tasks, and innovate along the way. This is what employee empowerment is all about. Frontline employees who are empowered know that their companies will support them as they take on numerous projects, enabling them to always achieve success and grow as they take on new responsibilities. In this article, we detail three top ways to empower manufacturing frontline employees. But first, lets get into what employee empowerment is and why it’s important.
What is employee empowerment?
In general, empowerment is the act or action of empowering or enabling someone to perform certain acts or duties. So, employee empowerment is a management philosophy that focuses on allowing employees to have greater autonomy and control over their day-to-day duties. In other words, this is in contrast to micromanagement, which does not allow for independent decision making.
Why is employee empowerment important?
Frontline employees who feel empower are more likely to feel invested in their work and perform better, which can result in several positive business outcomes. For example, increased productivity and creativity, greater trust in leadership, and more motivated employees. Essentially, when employees feel that their work and efforts matter, they may feel more satisfied about their job and therefore, are more likely to stay with the company. In fact, a Gallup report found that engaged employees are up to 43% less likely to seek other jobs.
What are 3 top ways to empower manufacturing frontline employees?
The best manufacturing organizations understand that their frontline employees play a huge role in their company’s overall success. If your frontline employees are not motivated to improve your products and services’ value, then your business’ improvements will become stagnant. Empowering your frontline employees means you’re all working together to make progress instead of just working to get your next paycheque. So, that means that you have to do more than compliment your workers when they accomplish something. Listed below are three top ways to empower manufacturing frontline employees
1. Collect employee feedback — and act on it
One of the most incredible ways to empower manufacturing frontline employees is to collect feedback and tangibly address them in a timely manner. Involving your frontline employees and getting their feedback on opportunities for improvement is a great way to engage your workforce. However, if you take a long time to address feedback or even worse, fail to act on it, you can expect your frontline employees to become gradually more disengaged and frustrated. A disregard for employee input sends a clear message that they aren’t valued and can’t make a real difference.
Nobody knows your frontline operations better than your frontline employees. So, managers and other leaders should seek feedback to uncover hidden insights. However, there will be times where frontline employees have feedback to share in the middle of running a piece of equipment or when they’re no longer at work. And there will other times where frontline employees won’t even bother sharing feedback because they know their leaders will either take a long time to address it or won’t even act on it at all.
That’s why manufacturing organizations should leverage a solution that takes care of an entire employee suggestion program from start to finish. For example, the LeanSuite’s Suggestion platform is a cloud-based idea management software that enables manufacturers to collect, manage, and implement employee feedback under one central hub. What’s more, with the Roles and Permissions feature, automated notifications, and real-time status updates, this ensures that your entire employee suggestion program is running in real-time.
2. Recognize and reward employees
Frontline employees are the backbone of most manufacturing organizations and they work tirelessly to produce the goods and services that make our lives better and our businesses successful. Moreover, even the most self-motivated employees can struggle to maintain enough energy to continually problem solve, innovate, and grow indefinitely. That’s why making the effort to recognize and reward employees for their contributions is one of the most important ways to empower manufacturing frontline employees.
Employee recognition doesn’t have to come from just managers and other leaders. Instead, you can also enable each and every frontline employee to recognize each other frequently with an employee recognition and reward platform. You can make moments of recognition truly memorable with the LeanSuite’s Suggestion Platform as it has a built-in recognition and reward system that allows frontline employees to earn points for valuable feedback that they provide. These points can then be redeemed for exciting gifts and experiences from a built-in prize catalogue that you can customize and curate to fit the desires of your workforce. The Suggestion Platform also has organization-wide channels for social recognition, with commenting and image-sharing capabilities, making it easy and fun for everyone to start showing appreciation.
The bottom line is – employee recognition and employee rewards are both important components to successfully empower your frontline employees. Recognition focuses on acknowledging and appreciating the effort and dedication of frontline employees, while rewards are tangible incentives given in exchange for performance.
3. Provide opportunities for professional growth
Jobs in manufacturing can seem like a dead-end job. And let’s face it, no one likes a dead-end job. This is because these jobs often leave minimal room for professional growth and they often require frontline employees to perform tedious tasks day in and day out, with little to look forward to. Therefore, making providing opportunities for professional growth one of the most important ways to empower manufacturing frontline employees.
Professional growth and employee empowerment are highly interconnected. In fact, 87% of millennials say that growth and career development are top priorities when searching for a career. You can invest in learning and development by encouraging employees to share their knowledge, take on new responsibilities, and attend industry conferences or events that gives them the power to learn and improve their skills.
Your leaders should try to act as coaches and mentors. That is to say, they should focus on how to empower employees to achieve their goals. They can do so by centring discussions on clearly defined objectives, making it much easier to build action plans and breaks down the steps needed to get from point A to B. Your leaders should also delegate additional responsibilities to frontline employees. Find out what team members are passionate about, give them some tasks and duties to match, and provide them with the training, resources, and encouragement they need to handle them successfully.
