How to get a People KPI in Lean Manufacturing

To excel at lean manufacturing, you need your workers with you. You need your people to be motivated, competent, and to have a mindset of continuous improvement.

If you look at your manufacturing employees, how are they doing lately? Would you say that staff satisfaction is at a “good enough” level? Or has it changed lately?

Most people want to feel good about going to work. Yet somewhere down the line, employees start feeling underappreciated. Underpaid. And left with a feeling of a general lack of recognition at work.

There is a lot of talk about tech and processes in lean manufacturing. What is being less talked about is the importance of all your leaders simply treating their team members in a good way. Yet it starts at the top. When management looks at daily or weekly KPIs, do you have one that includes employee morale?

Here’s how to get a people KPI in lean manufacturing:

Motivated people = Higher productivity

When you focus your lean manufacturing efforts on keeping morale high, you pave the road to higher productivity.

“All your processes, your effectiveness, it all depends on your mood. There’s a big correlation between not following safety regulations and not caring about other employees at work. When the mood is good the productivity is better”, says Christophe de Monie from BASF.

So is there an agile approach to measure employee morale in lean manufacturing?

How often should you measure employee morale?

With what frequency should you measure employee morale? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Or even get mood insights for every shift?

Some manufacturing leaders prefer a daily survey approach, or to see differences between shifts. Others go for a weekly, or bi-weekly approach.  There’s new technology to support all of these options, and it’s one of the most effective tools to use in your lean manufacturing operations. We’ll look into both tech-based and manual options further down.

“I wanted a survey for employees that was an ongoing system, like the Celpax”, says Eugène Kusse at Unilever Kleve. “Because I work on a daily basis, not on a two-year basis”, he continues.

What methodology is best for lean manufacturing?

One popular methodology is to use a baseline. Once you know what level of staff satisfaction you typically have during your shifts, you can then see how it changes over time. You’ll see weekly, monthly, and annual cycles.

When you apply an action, or make changes to the process, how does it affect your baseline of how people experience their workdays? If you get a daily snapshot of each shift, you can then see if the shifts are equally impacted.

You can verify the impact of long-term variations. It lets you track how high-season impacts the mood, or production peaks, quality issues, etc. As a new line manager takes over a shift, you can see how the team reacts to the new leadership style.

To take things further, management can also correlate with other business KPIs like the ratio of temp workers on the assembly line, retention, or sick leave.

Let’s look at different baseline methods to get this type of data for your manufacturing plant.

Manual versions

You can do a fun home-made version with virtually no budget at all.

1. Place two buckets at the exit point.
2. Write and hang a sign with the question “How was your day?” above the buckets.
3. Get employees to put a green or a red ball to give feedback as their shift finishes.
4. Count to see how many you got of each color. I.e. 60% green, and 40% red.

How was the energy on the production floor today, compared to yesterday? It’s a cheap way to get hands-on data. But it requires a lot of manual input to keep it going, over time.

Let’s look at automated ways of getting a baseline of employee morale.

Apps

Get your workers to download a survey tool app like Workday, 15five, TeamMood or Staffbase. You can also use solutions like Slack.

It’s a quick way for workers to give feedback. Just remember to make it voluntary, not all workers will be OK with using their private cell phone for company purposes. Make sure to carefully clarify privacy issues.

Devices

Physical devices have the advantage of being anonymous. There is no app to download, and no password to remember. A survey kiosk is a quick and easy way to get feedback in lean manufacturing where not all employees have emails or computer access. Companies like Celpax, Happy Or Not, Usabilla and Dynatouch offer affordable solutions to use smiley feedback devices.

Share the results

A surprisingly high number of leaders in traditional manufacturing forget the importance of sharing the findings.

If you measure daily, you don’t have to give daily updates, although that can easily be solved with an API, but you at least should aim for weekly, or bi-weekly updates.

Apart from showing the trends, you can also highlight findings from your lean manufacturing operations. What was the impact on the day the bonus was paid? Or yesterday with massive productivity issues at the assembly line? And did employee morale go up after the leadership training? Be transparent and share the result with your team.

And once you receive the ongoing data?

Then it’s time to take action!

As part of your lean manufacturing assessment, do a root cause analysis. Once ready, then decide, together with your employees, on the best way to solve the identified issues. Is top management ready to act? And put a budget behind it?

Start with solving small problems. Use storytelling to get there to win momentum and get more people to take an active role in identifying issues, and possible solutions. Successful lean managers also focus on activities aimed to glue the team together. Make sure middle management understands their crucial role to maintain employee morale at an optimum level. The mood baseline will guide them along the way, as you can immediately see the impact of your event to know if it was successful, and how successful it was.

As you focus on continuously improving the factors that affect your workers in a negative way, your employee morale baseline curve should show positive results. And generally speaking, this is badly needed.

The great resignation is having a massive impact on the manufacturing industry, with quit rates up as high as 78% since February 2020. If you haven’t already, it’s time to take employee morale seriously in your lean manufacturing business, and actively work to keep the retention rate in place.

Embrace change and create a culture of conversations among your employees. Use a People KPI to track the progress of your lean implementation. This way your business has a way better chance at keeping talent, and staying profitable.