Employee Engagement & Quality Control

I happened to visit a car manufacturing facility a few days ago. I walked through the floors of the assembly line passing by grumpy workers. I could almost see the following written on their faces “I hate this job and this company – but I need the money, and that is the one and only reason I am doing this.”

Accompanying me on this walk was the quality guru of the factory, and he was telling me about all their global quality certifications and the processes the company followed to ensure the cars rolling out of their assembly lines are of world class quality. When I glanced at one of the workers who was going about his work – mounting the tires on a car, I felt I heard the following “I am going to do as bad a job as I can afford to, without any risk to my job – so you better put in place quality controls and measures and whatever else is needed to cover the company”. If only they were thinking, “I am going to do the best job I can, knowing I can always rely on the tools available to me and the quality control measures the company has put in place to ensure any unintentional errors I make are identified and corrected before the car moves to the next stage in the assembly line.”

What would it take for the company to move from the existing scenario to the new scenario I had described? “Higher Employee Engagement” is the silver bullet – but unfortunately, that is not something available off-the-shelf. A great reward and recognition program encompasses “Day-to-Day” recognition, informal recognition and formal recognition programs. This could prove to be a very cost effective solution in driving up employee engagement levels, especially for a large workforce doing repetitive jobs.