Your child comes home from school and gets a 19/20 on their spelling test. Your college student comes back from winter break with a 3.8 GPA and is on the Dean’s List. You have a goal of losing 20 pounds and only lose 18 of them. You would be pretty impressed with these figures. They all seem pretty great. Let’s look at this in your shop:
You have a 100 piece order and your printers mess up 5 shirts the day. 95%
You produce 65 jobs a week and 1 of them doesn’t hit a deadline. That one job happened to be the 300 piece run. 98%
Your 6 head embroidery machine runs 200 Nike Polos on contract and snags 2 of them. 99%
The direct to garment busts out 29 pieces perfectly but 30 were ordered. 96%
You cringed and laughed at that a little right? 95-100% in categories of performance in your own family are pretty darn good. In your business, it could be the reason you lose a customer.
Do you get angry at your employees when they make mistakes? Do you think you employees intend to mess up shirts and cause your blood to boil? No employee that works for an hourly wage has any desire to upset their superior so the first rule to quality incentives are understanding that mistakes WILL happen. Most business owners get frustrated with mistakes, and while getting frustrated is a gut instinct, ask yourself what you could have done for your employees to avoid it.
Let’s go through a few things you might do to incentivize your employees to produce great work:
1. The Rule of 2
Make sure every single job has had at least 2 sets of eyes look at it on the test print. Get a green thumbs-up stamp and make sure one other person stamps a work order for a press check. You might catch an ink color or location switch.
2. The Marble Jar
It sounds silly but put a jar in the production facility that and add a marble for every completed job. When the jar fills up, give your staff a bonus. Kindergarten rules apply, but it
3. Rotate Staff
Allowing your employees to do the exact same job all hours of the day will slowly eat away at their job sanity which will affect quality. Rotate them often so that they can stay fresh.
4. Make it Fun
Find fresh new ideas to make printing fun. Have different contests and themes. People want to smile. If your screen printer made an amazing print, take a picture with them and the shirt and post it on social media.
Image source: 3rd Rail Print Space
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