How do you Measure Operator Motivation / Morale? Our Auditor wants Documentation

[Steve Prevette]

Our auditor wants documentation of how we measure motivation and morale. How do you do it?

As part of our safety program (and working towards OSHA VPP STAR status) we have been doing several efforts to understand motivation and morale. Right now, our current measures include:

1. Rates of union grievances, both safety related and non-safety related.

2. Rates of formal employee concerns that are safety and health related.

3. Results of a 17 question survey which is included as part of annual employee refresher training

Dr. Deming used to like to look at sick day rates. Since we don't have sick days separated from vacation days, we aren't able to do that.

We do these efforts not for "compliance" sake, but to do a better job and it has helped us improve our injury rates.

 

[Sean Kelley]

Qualityboi is correct in this. We have also been asked to measure the motivation of our employees and the best manner we have found is a survey. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[ASchmidt]

We are thinking of a survey as well, although we're afraid that everything will be negative. I remember asking the auditor if attendance and employee retention was a good measureable and was told that it wasn't.

 

[Steve Prevette]

I remember asking the auditor if attendance and employee retention was a good measureable and was told that it wasn't.

One thing about "goodness" or "badness" of measurables. It is really hard to tell how good or bad the measure is without collecting data. We have some measures that initially folks said - oh that's stupid, that'll never work. We collected data, and laid it out against our reportable injuries, and found several "leading" indicators which correlated to injury increases and decreases. If we had stopped when the "experts" said that was a "bad" measure, we would have never ended up measuring anything.

 

[Greg B]

I cannot believe that there would be such a standard (although you guys have proven it is there). What next? Guage everyones interpretation of 'Quality'...IMHO this is a ludicrous exercise. If there was a golden wand for morale assessment it would be legislated. Imagine if you could assess the morale of battle troops on a graph or when a new project is implemented...what an achievement that would be!!! You may as well graph sitings of the easter bunny and Santa clause...beaurocracy gone mad!!!

 

[Jen Kirley]

We are thinking of a survey as well, although we're afraid that everything will be negative. I remember asking the auditor if attendance and employee retention was a good measureable and was told that it wasn't.

I don't know what your survey is asking--are the questions actionable? Do they reflect your organization's attempt to help your employees achieve their best for quality product/service?

Having a lot of negative responses is not the main problem. Having a lot of consistently negative responses to the same questions could mean your program isn't effective or there's a lack of action.

Surveys can do a lot of good if they are used to drive positive efforts. I like the Baldrige survey at this site: http://www.quality.nist.gov/Progress.htm There's also a downloadable Access file to process the results, though I've never used that.

 

[qualityboi]

Really motivation and morale are two very different animals. The standard I am looking at is "Motivation to achieve quality objectives"...you can have tons of motivation with very low morale.

 

[AndyN]

I cannot believe that there would be such a standard (although you guys have proven it is there). What next? Guage everyones interpretation of 'Quality'...IMHO this is a ludicrous exercise. If there was a golden wand for morale assessment it would be legislated. Imagine if you could assess the morale of battle troops on a graph or when a new project is implemented...what an achievement that would be!!! You may as well graph sitings of the easter bunny and Santa clause...beaurocracy gone mad!!!

Well, yes.............but then it's easy for major customers to demand things (like this) from their suppliers (like in ISO/TS 16949) when they, themselves have no (effective) way to deal with such issues! Does anyone think that GM has a world class process to motivate and empower employees???????? Toyota, on the other hand.......

In some places, motivation is simply having a job to go to.............

BTW - attendance, tardiness (lateness) and/or retention (first 30, 60 90 days of employment) turn over etc are all reasonable measurements of morale - ask most informed HR managers......

Andy

 

[qualityboi]

When measuring morale, how do you factor in people that have an illness called depression?

 

[Randy]

Try decimation, it worked for the Roman Army.

Line all the employees up, have every 10th step out and pink slip them and blame it on poor product quality, not meeting production numbers, customer disatisfaction, excessive salary/benefit costs, or any other "motivator".