Is your staff turnover at an all-time high in your facility? If the answer is “yes,” it can be a serious problem because you have already invested in building the skills and experience of your staff. Now imagine a situation where your staff moves away to join your competitor, carrying all your operational strategies. This can easily give your opponents an edge in the market and result in a loss of market share, but the good thing is that there is something that you can do about it.
Hire the Right Staff
The journey to improving staff retention should start with selecting the right employees. Therefore, you need to pay close attention to identifying staff with the right skills and talents to bring onboard. Start by drawing the right job description of the specific positions and look for employees with matching skill-sets.
If you are looking for a packaging line manager, ensure that he/she has the right education skills and experience working in a similar position in the past. To select only the best skills for your business, you might consider working with an expert recruitment agency.
Develop the Right Organizational Culture
Once you have found the right employees, you need to create an organizational culture that encourages them to stay in your company. In some cases, you might opt to start with creating the right organizational culture to attract some of the best talents to your organization.
To build the right culture, as said by Iskander Makhmudov, you should redefine the mission of your organization to ensure that it is premised on the need to deliver value to staff. Then, understand what your staff wants and deliver it in line h the company’s objectives. Here are some key components to consider for a positive culture:
- Make it easy for employees to strike a good work-life balance.
- Provide a well-defined path for career growth.
- Extend health-care services of the staff to close family members, such as wife/husband and kids.
- Create good channels for communication between employees and management
HR Development
Every employee in your organization wants to feel that he/she is advancing in the career ladder. If you provide assurance for this growth, most employees will want to stick with you. One way of achieving this is through human resources development. Staff training not only provides employees with new skills but it prepares them to take up more challenging tasks.
With good staff development, you will find it pretty easy to fill vacant positions that might arise in your organization. For employees, additional training makes them to see your organization as home and want to make it better. They will also work harder to make the organization becomes more successful.
To make your manufacturing unit standout, one of the best strategies is ensuring you retain the talented staff. With highly talented and qualified staff, it becomes pretty easy for you to drive change, achieve targeted growth, and sustain high profits.
Best Practices for Data Security in Manufacturing
In 2017, news of Ransomware Wannacry cryptoworm that targeted large institutions, including manufacturing organizations and governments’ agencies across the globe, spread like bushfire. The virus attacked companies and encrypted the files in their system, making them inaccessible unless the organization owners paid a hefty ransom. It was a horrific experience that no one would want to get into.
Notably, Ransomware is only one type of threat to your data and organization. This brings us to one key question, “How do you protect your manufacturing facility’s data?” Here are some of the best practices for data security:
Create a Privacy Policy for Your Organization
The bottom line of any business is winning the trust of customers andpartners. Part of this involves being able to keep their details as private as possible – without leaking or misuse. Therefore, you need to create a good privacy policy that outlines how their information will be protected. In the policy, you should include:
- The nature of personal data that the organization gathers.
- How the information is used.
- Who has access to the information.
- The method of data protection and guarantee.
- Provide assurance that their data will not be shared without clients’ consent.
Maintain a Robust Data Inventory
There are different categories of data in every business, and they keep increasing as an organization grows. By keeping an updated inventory of your data, it becomes easy to follow all the details of your organization, from the production to customer details.
In the event of a problem, such as a data breach, as mentioned by Iskander Makhmudov, it will also be easy to assess the damage and rectify the problem. You should also consider data encryption as an additional layer of security to ensure that only those with decryption codes can gain access.
When creating data inventory, you might consider categorizing it into the following groups:
- Confidential: This category includes clients’ private info, such as bank routing numbers, social security numbers, and street addresses.
- Internal: This data category can cover details such as designs, company secrets, formulas, and recipes, depending on the company under consideration.
- Sensitive: This data group can include info such as audit records, tax reports, and board meeting minutes. The info should only be accessed by a few authorized persons.
Always Keep a Data Backup
If your data is stolen or damaged by malware, it can be a serious challenge trying to get it back. Think of a situation where an encryption malware damages data about the latest orders from your customer. This could compromise your production and even result in major losses. However, if you had a backup, restoring the data would be a lot easier. Consider backing up your data every couple of hours for better protection.
These best practices are only a few of the most important things that you should do to protect your manufacturing unit’s data. In addition, you should also train your staff on cyber-security and have an emergency protocol for data loss.
