Your Company’s Management Style is Driving Off Employees

Manufacturing does not have the reputation of being progressive or forward-thinking when it comes to management style, allowing their employees to grow and develop, or considering their employees’ mental health and feelings.

Maybe you think it’s soft and you think, “We never had any of that nonsense when I was young! We just sucked it up.”

Yes, and alcoholism and chronic illness are much more prevalent in the older generations than it is in the younger generations. That’s not a coincidence.

When it comes to new, “softer” leadership styles, manufacturing is still behind a bit. We have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude and think that most employee problems can be solved with higher salaries and more overtime.

But you also have to look at people’s job satisfaction, or their lack of it, to see that this isn’t working. How many of you deal with a lot of people calling out sick after a weekend, especially a holiday weekend? How many have associates who fail random drug tests?

A lot of times, people call in sick and use mind-altering substances because they don’t like their job. Maybe it’s boring and repetitive and doesn’t challenge them.

But more often, they feel a lot of stress and anxiety because of their work.

And that doesn’t happen because of the work, it happens because of their managers and supervisors.

You Don’t Have Employee Problems, You Have Manager Problems

Winston Churchill is one of my heroes and I look to him as a leader I admire. I based my management style on his.
Winston Churchill is one of my heroes and I look to him as a leader I admire.
Take a look at your employee churn rate, the average length of your employees’ time with you, and the length of time it takes to hire a replacement.

Are those numbers going up over time? Have they always been high? Are they higher in one particular department or on one particular shift than the others?

That’s the sign of a management problem, not a job problem.

Remember, people don’t leave a bad job, they leave bad managers.

If you pay your associates well, the work is at least somewhat engaging, and your employees feel heard and appreciated, they’ll stick around. In many cases, if you make your employees feel heard and appreciated, they’ll stick around even when someone else is offering more money.

Too often, I hear managers say, “People don’t want to work anymore.”

This is completely untrue. What they actually don’t want is to work for you anymore. They don’t want to work for their supervisor. They don’t want to work for their line manager.

They’re tired of being yelled at, mistreated, or dealing with idiots who couldn’t manage an ice cream truck, let alone an entire department.

And so they leave. They leave your factory, or they change departments within the operation, and you end up losing all that institutional and operational knowledge in a critical role. All because your manager doesn’t understand basic leadership or how to deal with younger generations who decided they deserve better than what they’re being dealt.

Check With Your HR People

The Human Resources department is going to be a good source of information for your managers’ styles and their complaints.

That’s because whenever someone quits, HR will often conduct an exit interview and ask questions like, “Why are you leaving?” and “What could we do to improve?”

The departing employee will give HR an earful about their terrible boss. That conversation may get passed up to someone further up the food chain, but more often than not — way more often than not — it gets ignored.

And so more and more and more people quit for the very same reason over the very same person, for years to come, until someone in HR finally says, “You know, I’m starting to sense a pattern. Maybe we should think about considering launching a preliminary investigation.”

Meanwhile, HR is not sharing these stories up the chain of command, and all you see at the top is that you’re losing more and more people, but you have no clue as to why or who’s responsible. You just know that you’re always hiring and replacing all the people who seem to always be leaving.

You can also hear a lot of this if you were to hold weekly meetings with all of your employees. I used to hold a weekly chat session with 10 – 12 employees and I would provide them with coffee and doughnuts.

Of course, the employees won’t always feel like management has their back — after all, their immediate supervisor doesn’t — so why should they believe that the executive team will? So the problem goes unmentioned, and you don’t hear about it directly from the source.

As an executive, you need to tell your HR team that you want to know the content of those exit interviews, and you need to make sure they don’t whitewash or sanitize what they’re being told. You need to know if your managers are a big problem and are causing all those departures.

Remember, employee turnover costs you a lot of money in terms of hiring, onboarding, and training, not to mention lost institutional and job knowledge, so you can’t afford not to know why people are leaving.

Bottom line, if you’re losing a lot of associates, and your salaries and benefits aren’t the reason. Don’t assume that “nobody wants to work anymore.” It’s that they don’t want to work for you.

If you’re losing a lot of people, look at your management team. You may need to staunch the bleeding by making a few strategic cuts of your own if you want to save your company.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Photo credit: Pixabay (Creative Commons 0)



Author: David Marshall
I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.