How To Communicate With Operator Level Employees

hi, i work in a manufacturing company. from past quite some time we have been observing that the operators working at machines which gives us raw material for another product are not giving us correct quality of the material and because of this many of our consignements have been rejected. we have already tried speaking to the HODs and the shift incharge etc but no use. now we have been asked to communicate directly to the operators so that they understand that the company products were rejected because our raw material was not finished properly and this way we lost a good amount of money. could you please advise about what kind of communication tool i can use to communicate with the operator level employees. i need to make them understand the financial impact of their act on the overall company. since this is a manufacturing plant so i can not plan for any electronic media display.

Dear Bipin,

Increase in rejection of the finished products could be because of many reasons. Have you investigaged causes of rejection? What was the % of rejection before and what is % of rejection after? Secondly, at what stage of the production process quality issues are occuring most? Have you done Pareto Analysis of the rejection? While talking to the operators, you must be armed with proper data. Mere giving some motivation lectures will not help.

Secondly, HODs are responsible for providing the output from their department. Why they are washing their hands off? Why Production Manager is silent? Has he investigated the causes of rejection? While solving the issue of rejection, you must solve it through HOD. If you communicate directly with the operators, it would tantamount to bypassing Supervisors, Shift in charge etc. This will undermine their authority further.

Causes of rejection could be:

a) Poor quality of the raw material

b) Poor maintenance of the machines

c) Tools and instruments not calibrated

d) Untrained staff

e) Excessive pressure on the production personnel for production

f) No intermediatary quality checks

g) No motivation from the Production manager

h) Production manager himself is demotivated. He says who motivates me?

i) Lack of technical competence of the shift in charge, Production Manager etc

In your post, you have given focus on communication. Nevertheless, you need to do pre-communication spade work. Otherwise, incomplete communication could convert your communication into rheteric and you will be back to square one.

Thanks,

Dinesh Divekar