FREE Employee Engagement Webinar w/Rodd Wagner

Employee engagement is a powerful driver of business results, from reduced turnover to higher productivity. Its greatest effect is on worker safety – a puzzling pattern given that frustrated employees don’t want to get injured any more than their energized colleagues. No one has studied this connection deeper or helped companies apply the lessons more than Rodd Wagner. Rodd literally wrote the book on engagement – twice. He’ll explain what’s going on in the minds of frontline workers and help you develop a plan to keep your people safer by engaging them.

Keeping frontline workers engaged with safety is a tricky business.

Tech can be effective, but there has long been a digital divide in the workplace. Software solutions have been deployed on a large scale for administrative and office workers, with similar support for "deskless" workers lagging behind.

According to a recent survey, in fact, 60% of frontline workers considered the tech provided by their employers to be inadequate, and 56% supplemented that tech with their own personal devices.

Engaging and Retaining Your Frontline Workers

There's a challenge facing every industrial application worksite - a challenge no one wants to talk about. This challenge is faced across all Construction and Manufacturing sectors, across all disciplines from Safety and Quality to Human Resources and Operations. The challenge can't be answered with a piece of PPE, or a sensor, or an employee survey. The risks of not meeting this challenge range from increased frequency and severity of safety incidents, to reduced efficiency and productivity.

The biggest challenge facing industry today is: Given the wide range of experience levels, temperaments, and personalities that exist in the industrial workforce of today, how can companies engage with and retain ALL of their workers regularly, efficiently and effectively?

The benefits of direct transparent engagement with workers are significant. A Gallup study determined that compared with business units in the bottom quartile of engagement, those in the top quartile realize improvements in the following areas:

41% reduction in absenteeism
24% reduction in turnover
40% reduction in quality defects
17% increase in productivity
21% increase in profitability

The most common response we hear when talking to leaders in industrial applications about engagement is some form of, “We completely understand the benefits of engagement, we just have no idea how to measure engagement or even where to start.” This is an understandable position to have, especially when looking specifically at your own workforce. Industrial workers span a wider range of ages, experience levels and backgrounds than any other segment of the workforce.

The good news is that modern technology and communication tools have made engagement more attainable than ever before. If you are interested to learn more about the impact that the Corvex Connected Worker platform can have on engagement, retention and other facets of an organization, check out our new customer case study.

The Importance of Real-time Risk

My past included a 5-year experience in the Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) software space and it taught me a lot about how the 3 things work together. When I first started GRC was extremely confusing to an ex supply chain guy and although I understood each component I really didn’t understand how they worked together. One day I was in training and the first thing the instructor did was draw a picture representing a building and said he was going to teach us what GRC was using Fire safety as the backdrop. I sat up in my seat and thought this is going to be interesting, little did I know it was the best explanation of GRC I have ever seen.

The Right Approach to "Smart PPE"

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves on this “Smart PPE” hype. While the technology is racing forward and there have been some interesting developments today’s frontline workers would benefit greatly by having the data they need when they need it. There has been a lot of excitement around “Smart PPE”, Industry 4.0, and a bunch of other acronyms that the technology community thinks the frontline worker is chomping at the bit to get in their hands or in a lot of cases on their body.

Would you apply for this position?

Wanted: Front Line Worker

Job Description

Put our life on the line every day
Work long hours
Strenuous, at times back-breaking work
Short breaks
Hierarchy sometimes based on years of service, not ability to lead/manage/motivate
Click "read more" to see the rest of the job posting...

When anyone here’s the word Audit they immediately cringe and feel they did something wrong. Imagine working on the frontline and doing your job to the best of your ability based on the way you were trained. One day your supervisor pulls you in and says “Based on a recent audit you have been doing a number of things wrong and need to change immediately”. In most cases that supervisor had no idea that things were complying with what the audit showed. What are the ramifications around this approach?

What Everyone in Industry Wants to See from Audits and Inspections

Real ACTION

Are Your Audits and Inspections Leading to Any Real Action Today?

What does your company make or process? Natural resources, automobiles, commercial buildings, complex machinery, something else? You have compliance responsibilities to manage and a vast host of audits and inspections for your workers on the frontline. New hires understand this if they have any experience in your industry. It’s part of the job. Part of the territory. Nothing to see here, move along.

Who’s Accountable for Driving Change Through Audit and Inspection?

The Answer for Most Companies is Everyone (and No One)

Your frontline workers know they have the responsibility to complete audit and inspection work. Do they have the accountability to enact changes that should come from it? Ask any business leader or executive coach, and they will agree—your company’s culture is a direct reflection of how your management team views accountability. Business leadership coach and author Peter Lowe states it succinctly¹:

“An organization is only ever as good as its people. In order for teams to truly thrive, people need freedom of responsibility, without the imposing cloud of micromanagement.”

The Dirty Secret Around Why Frontline Workers Hate Audits and Inspections

The Data Goes In. Nothing Ever Comes Out.

Audit and Inspections in Industry Today: The Information Abyss

We all know frontline workers hate spending time filling out the audit and inspection forms we put in front of them. It’s part of the job across all sectors of industry—lean manufacturing, heavy construction, oil & gas, you name it.

It’s not the extra work that grates nerves. It’s not the number of questions on paper-based checklists that creates the eye rolls. It’s the simple fact that frontline workers usually never hear anything back about the audits and inspections managers ask them to do. The data they are asked to care about gets collected and goes into an information black hole.

Does this look like the future?

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