The key to business success lies in high levels of productivity. Sure, a company can have all cards stacked in its favor, but if it’s not capable of fully utilizing its resources and going beyond the call of duty to make more with less, this intrinsic potential will go to waste.
On the other hand, we have seen more than one example of organizations that needed to fight an uphill battle only to come out as winners through sheer will, tenacity, and, yes, efficiency.
But, how can your organization conjure up that quality that so often seems so hard to attain, and what practical steps you should take to encourage higher levels of productivity among your ranks? Let us try to find out together in the article below.
Refine the employee training
That’s right — if you want to make genuine changes, you need to work with skills and attitudes rather than tools and outcomes. Therefore, put more effort into the onboarding process and employee training and try to make your workers acquainted with the latest business practices as well as skills like time management, collaboration, and focusing methods.
Also, remember that to get an inspired workforce, you need to lead by example and become a more inspiring leader. So, stay in touch with your company’s value streams and always work on the skills that can make them even leaner and more effective.
Improve communication and collaboration
Miscommunication and lackluster collaboration can have devastating effects on efficiency, especially if they are allowed to take root over an extended period of time. That is why you need to ensure all your employees are provided with timely, critical facts, allowed to freely express their opinions, and have an opportunity to engage in productive collaborative activities.
Most of these problems can be addressed with the greatest utilization of cloud resources that can be accessed remotely from multiple devices (laptops, headsets, etc.), and featuring built-in collaboration and communication capabilities.
Put more effort into equipment maintenance
To put it simply, poorly maintained equipment inevitably loses efficiency over time. So, putting your maintenance activities on the more standardized, frequent, and planned-out foundations will do a great job of ironing these wrinkles out while giving you tons of valuable data you can use to engage in predictive maintenance analytics.
Using the latest diagnostic approaches like professional remote vibration monitoring will make your insights even more detailed and allow you to address issues sooner. Keep refining the inspection process until you develop zero tolerance for performance drops.
Automate and outsource
Both these methods can go a long way in streamlining cumbersome business processes and making your company leaner. The only difference is that you are going to use automation for critical in-house manufacturing processes that feature a high level of repeatability. The recent generations of AI are much more capable of dealing with these processes than human beings with a lower margin of error.
Outsourcing, on the other hand, can offer tremendous help in areas like analytics, quality control, and logistics that are not related to the manufacturing process but still make an integral part of your gig.
Ensure a higher level of quality control
Rock-solid quality control is not only vital for meeting the expectations of your customers but also has a tremendous impact on standardization and refinement of manufacturing processes. These two things go hand in hand. In order to leverage this resource, you will need to keep very detailed manufacturing documentation, perform regular inspections, and engage in relentless testing and audits.
Defining the quality standards for each product will also uncover good production practices and allow you to keep streamlining the manufacturing process without reducing the desired output.
Schedule shifts to leverage peak productivity intervals
This may prove to be the most difficult challenge of all the methods you are going to implement. Be that as it may, all of your employees have intervals when they are capable of giving their 110%. Your job is to uncover these periods and use them to assign the most productive workers with the most valuable tasks.
Your workforce could also preferably use regular breaks and flexible timetables. Remember, their goal is not to work more but to work more but to work more efficiently. Handling shifts with this mindset will produce benefits ranging from low absenteeism to higher workplace motivation.
Work on employee engagement
Last but not least, even with the best possible training and tools at their disposal, your workers won’t put optimal performance if they don’t feel engaged. Working on stimulating scheduling is definitely one of the ways to approach this problem.
Other strategies may come in the form of good communication, workplace benefits, and bonuses for the most productive employees. Finally, providing good opportunities for career development will give workers a sense of ownership over the success of your company and make them work harder to work toward this mutual goal.
Well, these are the top seven strategies you can use to make sure your manufacturing company is working at optimal capacity and your workers are putting in their best performance. The present-day business environment is incredibly dense and competitive.
In circumstances like these, the fortunes of one company may be decided even by small things like above-the-average absentees, and few productivity drops. Leave no such things to chance and make sure your organization always keeps pushing the standards of efficiency.
⸻ Author Bio ⸻ ⸻
Brigitte Evans is a lifestyle blogger with a passion for design, culture, and health. She is a regular writer and contributor to numerous lifestyle blogs and online magazines. She also loves to travel and enjoy the great outdoors.
