Dive Brief:
- Manufacturers that create a "culture of caring" will benefit from a more engaged and productive workforce, according to Gregg Stedronsky, vice president of engineering for global safety, environment, and manufacturing excellence at General Mills, during his keynote at the Food Automation & Manufacturing Conference and Expo this week.
- Automation is a key focus of operations in the complex environment of the plant floor, but in the end, it's the operators who make all the difference. Facilitating understanding and simplifying technology to make operators feel more comfortable with their technical skills can lead to better performance.
- Other benefits from creating a culture of caring on the plant floor are behavior-based food safety and environmental monitoring, which takes a different and potentially more accurate approach to food safety problems and solutions, and crowdsourced ideas and answers to problems like water efficiency.
Dive Insight:
Plant operators are often the prime source of knowledge for how to make operations more effective, efficient, safe, and sustainable. When MillerCoors wanted to improve water efficiency, management asked for suggestions for best practices from every person at the company, implemented the best 50 ideas, and immediately reaped the benefits with savings of 1.5 billion gallons of water.
Unlike outside consultants, they are more likely to be intimately familiar with that specific company's production and processing workflows. Before driving up costs of consultancy fees, sometimes the easiest and most effective answers can be found on the floor, just by better engaging operators and asking them the right questions.
In any industry, employees want to feel heard and appreciated by management. Manufacturers that take the extra effort to demonstrate a culture of caring to their plant employees could boost morale and productivity. Mars has consistently been on Fortune's Best Companies to Work For list the past four years, and this year was the only food manufacturer to make the list. Mars manages a culture of caring for its employees by providing on-site occupational health and wellness facilities and offering classes at Mars University, an internal program that promotes continued education.
These types of efforts could lead to increased productivity (and therefore profitability) and a better reputation due to favorable worker treatment. This is becoming increasingly important to consumers who desire more transparency.