What if factory production staff didn’t have to feel like they were just cogs in a machine? In this video I talk about how one of ZenSmart’s customers managed to completely change the way workers in a factory creating on demand products felt about their jobs.
Watch, as I share the story of how their jobs completely changed, and what happened to help them re-humanise the factory process.
Then, if you’re ready to talk about how to make on demand manufacturing work better for you – and your employees – get in touch!
Transcript
No one said that all factory work was fulfilling, but what if it could be? In many factories that create custom print-on-demand products, people get treated like mushrooms, which means they’re kept in the dark and fit on the proverbial. People turn up for an 8-hour shift, they do a single, repetitive and often tedious job for hours, take a break and then come back tomorrow and do it all over again. But there’s an alternative that has the potential to change everything. What if we empower people to help them feel like they’re part of a team with a common purpose? One of our clients does this particularly well. They’ve made an absolute focus for their business. A real focus on joining people into a collective sense of shared goal. So how did they go about doing it? Well, in their case, everyone becomes part of a small team and they are small. Every team shares a dashboard. There are great big LCD screens that are updated every 60 seconds. Includes all sorts of information that’s very specific to that team and what they do. It goes and provides them all the feedback about how they’re going and what they’re doing and what they’re not doing so well. And if you execute that well, it creates a set of information that the team all shared and enables them to accept where they’re not going quite right, but also gives them feedback when they’re doing well. And if you do this, it can completely change the culture of the business. All of a sudden, people become part of a bigger project. They may look after a single function, but they share as a group in a collective responsibility in order to achieve an outcome. And that changes everything. People take responsibility. They develop a sense of pride, a sense of team. They want to start pushing themselves more. It’s basically tapping into basic human psychology. We all want to have a sense of ownership, celebrate our successes, be recognized for having achieved stuff. And I feel that’s why it’s important that we re-humanize the whole factory process. This all starts with information and open sharing of what people are doing and how they’re doing that. And if we do that well, we can go about making print on demand business a very, very different place. A place where people actually feel a sense of outcome. If you’d like to know more about how we do it and the way that we’ve implemented at different factories around the world, ring my bell, reach out. I’d like to tell you more.
