Good Work Toolbox

Compensation

• Establish a profit sharing program

• Reward workers with increases based on learning new skills

• Make all attempts to prevent laying off tenured workers

• Offer competitive compensation to employees based on local/regional employment census 

• Improve workplace ergonomics and environmental factors

• Ensure workspace accommodates workers of all levels of abilities

• Mechanize, automate or otherwise avoid dirty, heavy, noisy work

• Orient the workpiece to suit the worker

• Rotate workers between tasks during the work day to prevent repetitive motion injuries

• Establish a workplace ergonomics council to evaluate and monitor work

• Schedule breaks so entire teams, or even the plant, takes breaks at the same time

• Use small groups working together

• Schedule regular team meetings to encourage communication

• Cross train employees on their co-workers tasks

• Rotate workers between tasks during the work day to prevent boredom and burnout

• Rotate workers between departments or tasks for extended periods of time

• Expand tasks so that individuals or teams build significant portion or entire product

• Design work with long cycle times

• Give workers responsibilities beyond that of production

• Provide access to green areas, recreational areas, and lunch rooms

• Maintain workplace to ensure sanitary conditions for workers

• Focus attention on proper lighting, mitigating vibration, and controlling noise

• Give individuals responsibility for inspection and quality of own work

• Give teams responsibility for inspection and quality of own work

• Provide timely user feedback to teams

• Build leadership at all levels of the organization (opportunities for workers to serve on councils or committees)

• Make all attempts to prevent laying off tenured workers

• Build the status of workers through job titles

• Establish buffers of work in process to allow work pace to vary without affecting production rate

• Allow components or subassemblies to be completed away from main assembly line

• Expand work tasks to whole units or major components and build in parallel

• Ensure workers are properly equipped and capable of meeting performance goals

• Strive for continuous improvement (Kaizen) of work methods

• Promote autonomous function of work teams

• Involve workers in the creation of work standards and production plans

• Allow teams to schedule their production hours if possible, allow working remotely when possible

• Allow workers to question established rules without fearing repercussions

• Engage workers in the selection and evaluation of their management

• Give workers a measure of control over their compensation

• Give workers the opportunity to know and interact with end users

• Expand work cycles so that individuals build significant or entire parts of a product

• Create opportunities for workers to interact with end users or downstream customers of their task

• Build small working teams that are responsible for their own work

• Allow workers to provide input for organizational-level issues

• Disclose information such as finances, productivity, and salary distribution to workforce

• Fit jobs to people

• Promote job rotation to prevent burnout and increase skillset

• Cross train workers to perform their co-workers tasks and learn more about the whole process

• Offer workers the opportunity to receive job-related skills (i.e. classes)

• Increase compensation as workers expand their job-related skills

• Allow workers the flexibility to pursue personal interests and/or work later in life

• Avoid security searches or personal intrusions that could be considered demeaning