It’s important for plant leadership to keep their personnel motivated. As a critical part of operations, managers and leaders must know how to lead a maintenance team, so they are invested in, and satisfied with their role to perform at their best. This can have a tremendous impact on equipment reliability, productivity and overall plant performance.
If your maintenance department doesn’t feel motivated, your facility could suffer from increased downtime and higher turnover rates. With labor shortages, reactive maintenance pressures, and an aging workforce taking their toll on many maintenance teams, now is the time to ensure every team member feels valued and is ready to give their best efforts every day. A motivated maintenance team is crucial for enacting preventive disciplines that maximize uptime, and a strong culture also has a positive effect on safety and compliance. The eight tips below offer guidance for keeping your maintenance team motivated, efficient and successful.
Understanding the importance of motivation in maintenance teams
Your maintenance staff does more than fix machinery—they’re a critical element in keeping your plant running as effectively and efficiently as possible. Every moment your equipment is offline costs you a significant amount of time and resources. If a maintenance technician doesn’t feel the same motivation to get it back up and running as you do, it can cost you even more. Maintenance activity doesn’t always follow a set schedule, either. Even with predictive maintenance tasks adhering to reliable patterns, there will still be the occasional maintenance task that pops up when least expected. When it does, employee motivation can play an important part in ensuring that it’s done in time to prevent the worst-case scenario. All this means motivation and job satisfaction are critical for making sure maintenance work is performed on time and to the highest standards.
How to motivate factory workers: 8 tips
1. Foster self-ownership. Self-ownership, commitment—however you want to define it—is giving employees a degree of control over their role and responsibilities. When considering how to motivate workers in a factory, this is one of the most effective ways to better ensure that they feel a personal stake in operational success and improve compliance with preventive maintenance initiatives. Some steps to achieve this include:
- Avoid micromanaging and excessive “check-ins” beyond the requirements of the task, allowing teams to self-manage to a degree.
- Avoid requiring employees to do something only the way that you would do it—encourage them to identify agile methodologies that work best for them (while, of course, remaining in adherence with safety and regulatory standards).
- Give employees ownership over specific asset zones or production lines.
- Assign KPI metrics to teams so they can see their performance.
- Follow the other tips below—many of them feed into the concept of self-ownership over a role and can help your employees stay happy and motivated.
2. Invest in your employees. By supporting ongoing training and development, employees feel appreciated. Increased confidence in their role—alongside growing stature within the organization—translates to feelings of responsibility and loyalty to the company, which will encourage employees to complete their tasks quickly, efficiently and conscientiously. This is even more important today, as advanced technology including IIoT and AI take hold in your operations because training helps maintenance teams get the most value from automation. You can offer certification pathways in areas such as robotics or CMRP, as well as structured technical career ladders.
This tip is a true “win-win,” since you, as a maintenance supervisor, gain the benefit of better-trained workers, while your employees become more familiar with new technologies and processes – ultimately helping you and your team stay current with industry best practices.
3. Encourage—and act on—feedback. This step is another way to support employee self-ownership. Be sure to make it clear that employee feedback is welcomed and heard—whether in areas of process improvements, safety, unidentified efficiencies and more. Those who have the most hands-on experience with a task are often in the best position to identify a better way to do it. Employees will be more motivated to continue looking for improvements if they know that you listen to their feedback. Even if a particular suggestion isn’t aligned with business objectives or requirements, be sure to give due time to listen. Some ways you can collect this feedback from your maintenance operations staff is through anonymous surveys, one-on-one meetings, maintenance Kaizen events, structured root cause feedback sessions and the tried-and-true suggestion box. Be aware, however, that collecting feedback without acting on it can quickly erode trust and morale, making follow-through just as important as listening.
4. Recognize and reward achievements. Maintenance professionals are just like anyone else, in that they appreciate a little appreciation for all their hard work every so often. The occasional pat on the back—whether in the form of a word of encouragement or a formal award—can be a powerful step in creating a positive work environment where every maintenance worker gets the message that they are important and valued by the employer. Whether you present awards for reductions in downtime, success of predictive maintenance strategies or anything else, tying those recognitions to measurable outcomes helps strengthen a reliability culture.
5. Know when you need extra help. Overworked or undertrained employees will likely feel unappreciated by their management—and motivation to do their best work will drop as a result. Paying attention to metrics such as overtime hours worked, missed deadlines, error rates, dropping predictive maintenance compliance and other burnout indicators may provide you with a clue as to which of your maintenance techs are feeling the crunch. A key component of how to lead a maintenance team is knowing how to identify or anticipate times where the required maintenance capacity is beyond your available resources and be prepared to address the need for support.
In times like these, outsourced maintenance services can provide extra resources for expected or unexpected workload surges. Outsourcing can also provide expertise for processes and tasks in which your in-house personnel may not yet be skilled in. At the same time, it reduces the strain on internal teams’, allowing them to stay focused, engaged and effective over the long term.
6. Be open to change. It’s true that change can sometimes be intimidating for workers and management alike, but if change is sought and implemented in good faith, the benefits can far outweigh the growing pains. It’s important to keep an open mind, whether in process or technology. Overlooking the potential improvements may lead to a feeling of employee stagnation and demotivation. Assess any positive changes you can make—whether they are identified through employee feedback, management directives or your experience—and determine if a new method may be right for you. Continuous improvement is only possible if every maintenance employee understands why a change is being made and how it will benefit the entire operation. Resistance to new initiatives typically stems from a lack of clarity, not unwillingness. This is why it’s important to involve maintenance teams early during tech rollouts and use pilot programs ahead of full-scale adoption.
7. Enhance team collaboration. Motivating your maintenance team also calls for bringing every employee together to work as a team. Without a sense of camaraderie, maintenance teams can become isolated. This is why it’s important to hold team building activities and ensure teams work on cross-functional projects that require them to collaborate. These can include joint reliability review meetings as well as sharing OEE dashboards with multiple teams. Holding regular meetings with maintenance techs as a group also helps foster a feeling of togetherness that helps keep everyone motivated and focused on their collective goals. Breaking down silos enhances collaboration and shifts teams away from blame, helping problems get identified and resolved faster.
8. Prioritize safety and well-being. Physical health and mental well-being go hand-in-hand, which is why a big part of motivating your maintenance team is demonstrating a commitment to their safety. Beyond having established safety protocols and providing personal protective equipment, you also should recognize and reward safe work practices. It’s also important that maintenance managers have a policy of accepting feedback about potentially unsafe working conditions. Employees should not fear reprisals if they bring these issues to managers’ attention.
Linking motivation to reliability metrics
With a fully motivated and engaged maintenance team, the difference will be easy to see. When you ensure your teams are working as effectively and efficiently as possible, you will experience improvements across measurable KPIs including:
- PM compliance rates
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
- Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
- OEE availability
- Backlog reduction
- Repeat failure reduction
- Safety incident frequency
Start motivating teams today
As a maintenance manager, it is your job to ensure that your team is operating safely and efficiently each and every day. A motivated employee is one that will deliver the best possible service and remain with your organization. By demonstrating your commitment to building a culture of collaboration, appreciation, safety and transparency, you can ensure every employee feels that extrinsic motivation. Now that you have a better understanding of how to motivate workers in a factory, you can ensure that the work gets done, and at the end of the day, your employees will leave feeling accomplished, and most importantly, appreciated.
ATS can be your workforce partner dedicated to ensuring your teams remain motivated and engaged. To learn more about how our expertise can benefit your maintenance operations, reach out and speak with a member of our team today.
