For manufacturers, a new employee’s arrival is always an important moment. Due to the industry’s high turnover rate, organizations want to ensure a pleasant, effective, and fast onboarding process, allowing new managers to gain autonomy and fulfill their roles more rapidly.
So, how can manufacturing companies speed up their onboarding process and organize their new managers’ training?
It is essential to accompany a new manager in the early stages of their new role to prevent them from feeling neglected. Their onboarding needs to be structured to fully understand and get familiar with their new responsibilities, colleagues, team, expectations, and the organization’s processes. This way, the manager can quickly integrate and gain autonomy towards his responsibilities.
Many organizations already use Folks HR’s software to facilitate the employee onboarding process. Indeed, onboarding software eliminates administrative heaviness, repetitive tasks, and help avoid oversights during the different integration stages. With HR technology, the onboarding period will be a pleasant and motivating experience for both parties.
Team leaders and supervisors often use many different management tools within the same organization, and some even adopt their management practices based on their past experiences. With few management standards, new managers will find it difficult to take ownership of their work while also aligning with the organization’s objectives.
However, companies with a Leader Standard Work routine will benefit from a standardized management performance from one shift or team to another. For example, a manager might have certain standardized management practices in their daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.
Consequently, a new supervisor or manager could immediately make his first Gemba walks with their team and participate in their first meetings. As a result, they will be more likely to develop and gain autonomy in their role while also adopting the company’s management processes.
Access to procedures and knowledge is often critical for operations to run smoothly inside an organization. However, many will still see their new managers spending precious time looking for the right procedures manual, often hidden somewhere near workstations or seeking the help of an experienced employee who knows a specific process by heart. Generally speaking, manufacturing companies and operations teams cannot afford to document procedures in such outdated systems and time-consuming tasks.
In such a high turnover rate context, it’s even more critical to capture the company’s knowledge to make it accessible instead of simply relying on experienced employees. With solutions such as Tervene’s knowledge center and Folks HR’s communication portal module, you can centralize the company’s documents, procedures, and knowledge. Therefore, it becomes easy for operators, supervisors, and managers to access and consult the information they need.
With the numerous recruitment challenges that manufacturers face, many organizations now prioritize internal recruitment to fill management positions. For example, operators could see themselves being promoted to team leader or supervisor roles. One significant advantage of doing so is that the employee can use their technical experience in their previous position to help their team.
The use of HR software for manufacturing is also a powerful tool for manufacturers to structure the employee internal career management. For example, Folks HR’s career development feature helps track the progression of an employee’s skills. Combined with its certificate and management training module, managers can follow a structured and personalized training plan.
For a newly promoted manager, one of their main challenges will be to progressively learn to abandon their technical work to better focus on their new management tasks. Also, as mentioned earlier, setting up a standardized routine (Leader Standard Work) is another effective way to help them structure their work and adopt the appropriate management behaviors for their new role. In short, when a new manager possesses properly adapted tools for their position, the transition from a technical role to a management role will be a lot smoother.
To allow continuous development of a manager’s skills, an organization must set up a training and management skills enhancement structure.
This structure can include several elements such as individual coaching plans, recurring 1-to-1 meetings, objectives and management behaviors analysis, as well as what corrective measures should be taken in case of divergent results (training and/or support needs). Ideally, an organization’s visibility of management behaviors is a must to support its managers adequately.
Performance evaluation is a common practice usually executed between administration and managers and between managers and employees. For this purpose, Folks HR offers its performance management software. It is a complete tool that saves you time when planning employee evaluations and lets you personalize the performance evaluation grids.
Ultimately, the better a manager can identify their opportunities for improvement, training, and learning, the faster they will gain valuable management skills to excel in their role.
Our daily management system empowers frontline teams and top management to reach operational excellence with stronger daily control, communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and improvement processes.
Manufacturers, operation leaders, and many SMBs digitized their management practices with our help: Gemba walks, daily checks, audits, inspections, operational meetings, digital procedures, improvement management, and much more.
Considering the costs of recruiting and onboarding processes and the loss of skills and expertise associated with high turnover rates, it is crucial to focus on engagement strategies – and on key statistics that showcase the state of retention in companies. Here is everything you need to know about employee retention, and tips to increase retention rates in your organization.
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