Top 5 Challenges For Manufacturing Supervisors: #4 Recognition
Among our plant supervisors, I see some consistent patterns that represent performance shortfalls. All manufacturing supervisors face similar challenges but unless they are trained and coached how to overcome these challenges, performance shortfalls may not be of own their fault. Most probably, your supervisors give you great daily effort, but maybe they just don’t have the knowledge to overcome the leadership challenges they face. In this series of articles, I outline and discuss the top five of these common challenges, from the least impactful to your business to the most impactful to your business. Explore these points for yourself and see how your supervisors stack-up against these challenges.
Top 5 Challenges: #4
4. EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT:
Positive Employee Recognition
Supervisors are in the absolute best position to offer their employees words of praise and encouragement. Supervisors know the importance of it, however most supervisors don’t know what to recognize their employees for or even how to effectively recognize them. Often, supervisors think that formal company-wide programs and events do the trick.
Supervisors don’t always believe that they need to informally recognize individual performance even though opportunities to do it can be quite frequent amongst the employees on their own team. In their minds, recognition is a “company thing”. However, this supervisor philosophy is truly a flawed one. A small word of praise by a supervisor to an employee at the end of a shift for a job well done is much more impactful than anything that can be done at a company-level.
In a recent Gallup workplace survey, employees were asked to recall who gave them their most meaningful and memorable recognition. The data revealed the most memorable recognition comes most often from an employee's supervisor. Walking out the factory door after a good day of work and a word of praise for a job well done puts a bounce in an employee’s step and a smile on their face. This result can't be overlooked or its impact underestimated.
Unfortunately, most supervisors are not on the lookout for these opportunities and so many small performance successes get overlooked and go unrecognized. This is unfortunate, because a little favorable employee recognition at a shopfloor-level can really improve company morale and factory results.
When I worked for a large Fortune-500 food processing company early in my career, this company had an unwritten HR policy that required all supervisors to administer two letters of commendations for every one formal corrective action. This was a great policy for a new supervisor like me at the time. This policy required that I always be on the lookout for opportunities to provide my employees with positive written feedback. This feedback would be told to the employee directly during a one-on-one meeting and then a copy of the commendation would be dropped into the employee’s HR file. Talk about impactful!
But giving employee’s positive feedback doesn’t need to be some complicated event. Just stopping over to an employee’s workstation at the end of a good shift, helping them with their work a little and saying a sincere “Thank you”, goes a long way with an employee. But if supervisors aren’t on the lookout for these opportunities, then they miss them.
You see, when an employee hears some positive comments from their boss about their performance, they start to realize that how they perform really does matter. It tells the employee that their supervisor cares about them and their performance enough to say something about it. It says, "Job Performance Matters!". This engages the employee, and an engaged employee contributes more than a disengaged employee. You and I appreciate positive feedback too. When someone recognizes our contribution, we energize and engage. It’s that simple.
If you have supervisors in your company that could benefit from some training in this area, consider enrolling them in Concepts in Manufacturing Leader (CML) - Level 200 training. CML200 training is all about how to effectively lead manufacturing teams. Specifically, training session CML205: Employee Engagement covers this topic in detail. This sessions covers the importance of employee recognition and the best methods to do it within the walls of a manufacturing plant.
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