KPIs aren't just for the consideration of management. In fact, they offer as much or more value to your employees on the factory floor as they do anyone in your operation. In this article, we'll take a closer look at KPIs, their various benefits, and how they can be used to better engage and motivate your team.
Defining the Terms
Before we dive into how displaying KPIs on the factory floor can help you engage your team, it's important to define KPIs from a manufacturing standpoint. KPI stands for key performance indicator. In terms of manufacturing, KPIs can include metrics such as production output, downtime, units produced per hour, and more. Visual management, meanwhile, is a system in which KPIs are displayed on a factory floor to provide clear, visible objectives to the front line employees.
Trends and Benefits of KPIs
There are a number of benefits associated with displaying KPIs on your factory floor as well as a few recent trends that displaying KPIs allows you to take advantage of. These trends and benefits include:
Data Visualization
It's a proven fact that learning and memory are directly connected to our visual perception. When employees see KPIs in front of them each day, it really drives home the goals that these KPIs are supposed to instill. In fact, our clients report a 5%-10% increase in productivity just by having their employees see this data each day.
Power of Numbers
Numbers don't lie. They aren't subjective, and most of the time they can be understood at a glance. Displaying KPIs on your factory floor allows your employees to immediately recognize areas that need improvement. It also makes it easier for your team to set goals and tends to motivate them to work harder in order to make the numbers better.
Gamification
One popular trend that is currently sweeping through the business world is gamification. Gamification attempts to take some of the elements that make games such as video games addictive and competitive and apply them to work environments. By displaying KPIs on your factory floor, you can encourage competitions between your team and thus take advantage of the benefits of gamification. Competition is an excellent motivator, and being able to see the results of the competition in real time motivate employees to work even harder.
Transparency
Employees want to feel as if they are actually a part of something and keyed in on important information. Otherwise, they may begin to grow dissatisfied with their job, making employee retention more difficult. Since employee retention is such an important factor in running any successful business, it's a good idea to keep your employees feeling as if they are part of something bigger by being open and transparent. Displaying KPIs on your factory floor can help with some of that transparency by constantly keeping all of your employees in the loop when it comes to the information that is most important to them. In addition to helping your employees feel better about their jobs, this kind of transparency can also help them better understand how the entire operation works, enabling them to work more efficiently with other employees and the machines they are using.
Displaying KPIs with TileBoard
If you decide to take advantage of the benefits of displaying KPIs on your factory floor, the next step is to determine how you want to go about doing this, Thankfully, TileBoard makes displaying KPIs easier than ever before. TileBoard is a real-time data monitoring solution that enables you to easily display up-to-the-minute KPIs on any TV or screen. You can put the software in slideshow mode to display a range of KPIs on a TV screen as well as display a dashboard on your screen to show important alerts and relevant tiles that will keep your team engaged. The benefits of displaying KPIs on your factory floor are well worth taking advantage of, and no other software makes this process easier or more effective than TileBoard.
What are the Best KPIs to Display?
There are a wide range of KPIs that you can display, each with their own set of motivating or informative benefits. These KPIs include:
- Progress towards team goals
- Productivity statistics such as production output, efficiency, and quality
- Visuals such as charts and graphs
- Short-term, day-to-day statistics
- Metrics that link the results of the factory floor to the overall operation/business strategy
Of course, these are just a small sample of the KPIs you have available to choose from. When deciding which KPIs to display, there are a few important things that you should keep in mind. First, it's important to focus only on the critical data and not overwhelm your team with too much information. Second, don't be afraid to display negative stats; seeing areas that need to be improved on can be incredibly motivating. Lastly, make sure the KPIs you display on your factory floor are actually controllable by your team. You want your team to know that their hard work can make a difference in the numbers that are displayed.
By displaying these KPIs, you can provide a substantial boost to your team's motivation with little effort at all. If you would like to learn more about how TileBoard can allow you to effectively and easily display any KPIs that you choose or if you have any questions about how to best go about displaying KPIs on your factory floor, then we invite you to contact us today.
