Ten Ways to Improve Communication in Manufacturing

Successful communication relies on understanding the manufacturing environment. What works in an office with product engineers is not as effective on a factory floor. This article offers a multi-layer approach to improving communication throughout manufacturing organizations.

As anyone with experience working in a team knows, when communication breaks down, productivity soon follows. A survey by Fierce, Inc. found that 86% of employees blame lack of communication for workplace failures, highlighting how pervasive the problem can be.

Why? Management and frontline workers rarely occupy the same space in most production environments. Because of this physical barrier, you can expect a disconnected workforce, leading them to withhold important information and make costly mistakes. Not only that, but the most talented employees will also feel disengaged from your company’s culture, negatively affecting employee retention and development.

Disconnected and poor communications can have even further-reaching effects than production errors or quality issues. For example, ineffective communications may jeopardize employee health and safety, potentially landing your business in legal hot water. That can also impact customer satisfaction, leading to poor online reviews and a diminished digital presence.

For the above reasons, your company’s profits will likely fall if you cannot maintain effective on-site communications.

The manufacturing industry suffers from communications problems more so than other industries. The reasons for this are largely due to the nature of the work:

• Manufacturing teams are often distant from company management and the head office.
• Factory floors are large production spaces; face-to-face communication is often difficult and sporadic, with few meetings between management and workers.
• Health and safety protocols dictate that employees keep time on devices to a minimum.
• Without a desk, employees don’t have access to a company PC which is the traditional method of long-distance communications (see: 83% of non-desk workers have no corporate email address).

With these challenges in mind, you may ask how your manufacturing business can improve communications? Well, this article will outline ten steps to follow that will surely put you on the path toward better factory-floor (and company-wide) communication.

Create an action plan.

Study your competitors.

Making big changes to company policy and operations is a daunting task. You risk antagonizing employees and inadvertently making communications worse if it goes wrong. Luckily, you will not be the only management team stuck in this same boat.

As affiliate program management services have shown, you can find huge value and insight in studying your competitors. Comparing analytical data will demonstrate trends of what competitors have done right and what they have done wrong.

Asking these questions is the first step toward self-improvement. The next step is to ask what you can learn from your competitors. Top manufacturing companies didn’t arrive at their position by accident — it is the brainchild of significant capital expenditure and a lengthy trial-and-error process.

So if you can evaluate your adversaries' workplace policies effectively, you’ll find a shortcut toward improving your manufacturing business’s communications.

Identify your weaknesses.

The next question is — how does my business compare to others? You’ll need a reliable way of measuring plant communications standards to answer this question.

You’ll want to collect data on all the relevant KPIs — employee retention, average production cycle times, and production line targets vs actual output. This information should help paint a picture of where your business falls short of industry standards. Identifying gaps will show where you need to direct your time, energy, and capital.

Beyond this, you may want to simply drop in at your manufacturing plant to speak firsthand to the middle management and workers there. Based on anecdotal, first-hand walking around observation, you can gain useful insight into how processes work well (or break down). Press employees with questions about problems that have recently come up and ask how the team rectified the issues. Be sure to check back in a couple of weeks to follow up on what was discussed and see the progress (or lack thereof) for yourself.

Establish a vision for your company.

Once you’ve collated your findings, you can work toward building a vision for your company. Setting realistic, long-term goals is the key here, e.g., digitally transforming communications in your company. You’ll want to see a marked improvement in communications standards, so don’t set them too low!

On the other hand, you’ll also want to temper your expectations and be ready to return to the drawing board if necessary. Regularly reviewing those performance indicators will make your senior management adept at responding to issues as and when they occur. As such, you must check on your progress at least once a month once you establish and present your communications vision.

Improve your company’s culture.

Train effective leaders.

To show your workforce you’re serious about improving communication, the change must flow from the top. Once your senior management has agreed on a comms solution, you must bring your middle-management and factory floor supervisors up to scratch.

You may have heard the saying before that “management must speak with one voice.” This adage is especially true in the manufacturing industry, where contradictory information can result in employee injury or equipment damage.

Consequently, you must onboard your company’s management about changes to your communications structure. Getting off to a strong start can be tricky when managing hybrid teams, but ensuring everyone communicates to the same standard is necessary.

Normalize employee feedback.

Once your management team has nailed down the basics, you’ll want to turn your attention to improving employee communication. The most effective way to begin this process is to stop and listen to what they have to say.

Questionnaires, feedback forms, and direct meetings with factory employees effectively show them that you care about their opinions. This type of communication will foster a positive culture at your company where anyone will feel empowered to speak up, no matter where they are on the company ladder. Not only that — you’ll likely learn a thing or two from them!

Emphasize regular communication.

So you’ve trained a high-quality team of effective communicators and have systems to encourage employee feedback. That’s all great, but it means nothing if you fall back into your old ways six months later. As such, you must encourage regular communication between your team.

As mentioned earlier, change must flow from the top in policy decision-making. Your senior management must keep tabs on KPIs and reach out to factory supervisors when you fall below targets. Once you have established a system of accountability, you’ll know who to approach when systems break down.

Further down the company hierarchy, you also want to encourage regular communication between supervisors and employees. Factory workers are often the first to know about problems in the production line. As such, it’s crucial to give the frontline employees a platform to voice their concerns promptly.

Your factory supervisors need to own the responsibility for most of this, regularly checking in with each team member. Once your teams achieve a regular cadence, positive workplace culture will surely follow. By assuring employees their concerns are valid and heard, they will begin going out of their way to approach supervisors when problems arise.

Recognize and reward key players.

Employees who feel valued will be more productive and stick with your company for longer. Experts recommend a system to reward key players for their hard work to encourage employee retention.

Of course, you’ll want to celebrate the achievements of strong workers out in the open. Doing so will help establish a ‘friendly competitive’ nature amongst your workforce, in which everyone is working to be the best team player they can be.

Employee of the week (or month) programs are an example of this system. When employees reach a milestone, publicly celebrate their success. The reward could be anything from a paycheck bonus to free cinema tickets; evaluate your workforce and see what works best for you. Whatever incentive you choose, you may consider integrating it into your company’s contract management software to make the process smoother.

Establish the perfect communications system.

To remedy communications issues, you may choose to use a third-party comms platform to keep your team connected. Many companies offer a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform with all the essential features you need from a comms app.

UCaaS follows a subscription model making it relatively cheap to implement, requiring lower initial capital expenditure than other comms solutions. Additionally, these cloud applications take very little technical knowledge to set up. Usually, it only requires the installation of their app onto company devices or employees’ phones.

With that in mind, here are the features you may want to look for in a communications system:

Real-time updates.

A comms system's most important feature is that it provides real-time information. Factories are busy places with hundreds (if not thousands) of separate working parts, meaning production lines can fall behind schedule at almost a moment’s notice.

For this reason, it’s crucial that employees are kept ‘in the know’ about production status, so they can see where bottlenecks arise.

Digital signage is a particularly effective real-time communication in place of more traditional bulletin boards. These signs automatically update as soon as the inputs are published, delivering relevant information to the right teams at the right time. You may consider implementing a ‘traffic light system,’ directing factory floor workers to the most critical issues first.

If that system is working well for you, you may consider going a step further and implementing online collaboration software for keeping track of production. Integrating employees into workflow apps will get them up-to-date information when they need it most.

Two-way communication channels.

Communication is a two-way street, intending to connect rather than correct. To make that happen, you should be willing to listen as much as you’re willing to speak. For this reason, you must offer factory floor employees a means of responding to requests from higher-ups.

Company instant-messaging services are a fantastic way of hearing the right information back from employees promptly. These services usually come with a mobile application that has passed the audits of a rigorous app store testing platform. Giving employees an instant feedback method means factory workers can reliably respond much faster than via an email from a desktop PC.

Time is of the essence in manufacturing environments. Factories can be huge places, with teams spread across large buildings, meaning it takes time for information to reach the right supervisor. As such, two-way comms channels allow for rapid transfer of information, mitigating bottlenecks by responding to them quickly.

To remedy more severe workplace issues, you may consider investing in call center technology for employees to access directly from the factory floor. Skipping the ‘supervisor’ level of management is sometimes desirable as it allows workers to raise concerns they may not feel comfortable sharing. It also allows senior management to compare what they have heard from their supervisors vs what their factory employees are saying.

Foreign language support.

Manufacturing is one of the most diverse workforces in America, bringing together people from all backgrounds. Data from the National Immigration Forum shows that 19% of manufacturing workers are immigrants, above the national average of 17%.

The survey demonstrates how crucial it is to make your company’s communications accessible and inviting to all your workers. It might be the case that workers in your company don’t speak English as their first language. Instead of using this as an excuse for communications breaking down, extend a hand to them to show them you care about diversity and inclusivity.

In this case, you should go out of your way to integrate foreign language support into your comms systems. You may even opt for real-time translation services, allowing for uninterrupted updates from all sections of your workforce.

Getting started on better communication.

Manufacturers who establish better communications may increase their bottom line by 10%. This article has outlined just one process for achieving that, but it does not mean to say there is a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem.

In reality, you’ll want to find a communications solution that works for your specific company’s needs. Generally, you should strive to tailor your communications processes to the issues faced in your workforce. Set yourself up for success by maintaining high standards moving forward. Be sure to record all your progress so you can see what has worked well and what hasn’t.

Once you have improved and produced effective communication, you have a well-connected and productive factory floor. The benefits of clear communication are a safer, more positive workplace for your employees and higher customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) from your customers.

About the author

Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, a cloud phone system and business voicemail platform for better and easier team collaboration. She has over ten years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies and partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Grace Lau also published articles for domains such as UpCity and Soundstripe.

Editor's note

This article was originally published on July 27, 2022. It has been updated for freshness and accuracy.