The Importance of Communications with Dan Anderson
When it comes to improving your reliability and maintenance programs, communication is the key to successful implementation of any sustainable business initiative. The new business processes are always complicated to understand and when you don’t make clear job plans for them, it becomes very difficult to get everyone on the same page. There are a lot of problems arise because the plan was either not clearly communicated to the team or scheduling technique wasn’t known to everyone. All of these aspects lead to failures because people aren’t aware of certain things they should have complete information about.
The organizations don’t take enough time to come up with a communications plan to handle change on the long way to a sustainable and growing reliability program. When you make internal changes or technical modifications in your business programs, people need to know about it because they are the ones who are going to keep things running all day long. Even if you successfully make improvements, if people don’t adopt the new designs, you are still going to fail in the long run. There is always a need for change management plan to stop these kinds of problems.
This plan needs to be structured where upper management will lead the change, middle management will drive that change and the employees will adopt and implement the change in the whole organization. This is where the management needs to value the opinion of everyone, appreciate and support the good work of the team and help them in any way they can. When people are informed of the important decisions, they are motivated by the desire to be more valuable to their organization. This is where leadership plays an important role where awareness needs to empowerment and intelligent decision making because everyone is pitching in their skills and experience here.
There are a lot of ways to engage the employees but you have to know the strengths of your team first. Some employees like the meetings, some like reading content on different topics, and other like practical demonstrations. Usually, the best way to let everyone know about your business goals and other changes is to advertise them. When you publish your work plans, people hardly miss them and that leads to a better understanding for individuals to know their roles and responsibilities. You can also arrange a meeting once in a while to take input from the staff.
Let them know your change plans and be genuine about it. This is the key to successful communication because people appreciate when you really tell them what’s going on and what’s actually going to happen in the near future. And then your message should be consistent to avoid any ambiguity later on. The thing is people are always going to be afraid of the change—if not for themselves, then for the people they have worked alongside all their career—and when they are told things, they tend to trust the decisions of the management and leads to better reliability programs.
Eruditio Links:
- Eruditio, LLC
- A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance – Free eBook
- Maintenance Planning & Scheduling: Planning for Profitability Video Course
Dan Anderson Links:
Rooted In Reliability podcast is a proud member of Reliability.fm network. We encourage you to please rate and review this podcast on iTunes and Stitcher. It ensures the podcast stays relevant and is easy to find by like-minded professionals. It is only with your ratings and reviews that the Rooted In Reliability podcast can continue to grow. Thank you for providing the small but critical support for the Rooted In Reliability podcast!
Leave a Reply