Manufacturers are experiencing a skills shortage, and loss of knowledge, through experienced and skilled employees leaving. This is driving the need for the Manufacturing Industry to stem the steady flow of losing people and engage their internal ranks, quickly and effectively. Finding skilled employees is difficult enough so they must make certain they engage and keep the staff they have. In this interactive roundtable discussion we'll hear from a panel of manufacturing industry leaders who will share best practices in engaging their front-line employees.

To help guide the roundtable panel discussion, our facilitator will cover some or all of the following:

• Tell us about your manufacturing environment – demographics, working environment and leadership structure.
• What is your company’s greatest challenge in engaging front-line manufacturing employees?
• How do you measure engagement on the production floor? What method(s) are you using to collect feedback from production employees?
• One challenge that many of us struggle with is coming up with, and following through with, action plans to improve weaknesses in employee engagement. What’s worked well for you?
• How do you hold leaders in your company accountable for owning/following-up with action plans?
• We know that poor, or little, communication can create unending production, quality, and human resource problems. What methods is your company successfully using to communicate with front-line production employees?
• How are your leaders, especially line supervisors, held accountable for communicating with their teams?
• How has your organization nurtured a culture of quality?
• What methods have you utilized to engage your front-line employees in identifying opportunities to improve production? Please share your success stories!
• Front-line turnover (both with employees and supervisors) is a significant challenge in many organizations. What has worked at your company to rapidly train new workers?
• Many smaller manufacturers have the same skilled-workforce needs as larger companies but not the same resources to train them. What advice do you have for these colleagues?

This session will focus on providing insight into:

• The results can be quite heartening after seeing significant improvement around internal operational scores around turnover, process efficiency, cost-reduction etc.
• Successes are being achieved using various continuous improvement strategies where you constantly adjust & tweak levers required to keep pace with the dynamics of your industry.