Meeting production targets can become a serious challenge in the event of downtime or other situations that cause production to drop temporarily, including a corona crisis. Yet, even a maintenance shutdown, that ‘only’ leaves production staff sidelined, may serve as an opportunity to bounce back stronger and more agile. Being a good employer, offering training opportunities to your staff to improve their skills is a proven way to leverage downtime.
Widely employable
In our perception, many employers still regard education as a mere expense, allowing crucial advantages to go to waste. For one thing, employees become more competent in their daily work or in tasks they haven’t performed before. By offering employees a much broader understanding of processes and machines and/or more in-depth knowledge of different processes, they become more widely employable. At the same time, signing employees up for a training course makes them feel appreciated which, in turn, motivates them to work even harder.
Eye-openers
Moreover, a broader understanding of business operations and the exact place of their individual job in the overall picture makes employees more alert to possible disruptions and malfunctions which ultimately translates into…less downtime. Luckily we have quite a few customers who are already reaping the fruits from this approach as their employees are spontaneously coming up with suggestions for improvement. In case employees show some reluctance to training opportunities, we suggest standing firm. We have had our share of operators claiming they know absolutely everything about their extruder for example. After hearing our story, however, they were confronted with some eye-openers which eventually resulted in improved settings of the extruder.
Customized webinars
Maintenance staff in turn can be offered training in fine-tuning processes and machines, either ‘on the job’ or classroom style. Investing in education as a good employer not only pays off in the short run but will improve your company’s image as well which will eventually simplify the recruitment of new employees and may even attract new customers. Just remember you can always call on Selmers for training advice. As long as the coronavirus is not yet contained, we can arrange customized webinars instead. And are you already familiar with our E-learnings that we can arrange for your convenience? They can even be linked to your Selmers Plant Management System, which may come in very handy on the job! For more information on our training program, just call our sales department or send an email to sales@selmers.com.
