Is a ‘Super Shopfloor' powered by people?
This question has to be answered with a clear ‘yes'. Employees are, in my opinion, the most valuable stakeholders of a company and thus the main contributors to the success of an organisation. Employees are continuously maintaining and improving our business processes, and having the right processes and the right flow in place, guarantees success.

How to motivate people?
We have to understand that every person is an individual with a personality of their own. There are differences like family background, education, culture, religion, society and not to forget day to day variations. Bearing these elements in mind, it is obvious that there is no single recipe to motivate people. Every individual has strengths and weaknesses.

Based mainly on these strengths, we have to allocate the right people for the right work, while concurrently helping them overcome their weaknesses. But there are some aspects that we, as management, have to consider.

First and foremost, we have to prepare the organisation and give guidance to provide people the security to act within a known and safe range. In order to do that, we have to determine what is important and expected from a company's management perspective. What I am alluding to are the values and principles that make a company's expectation clear in terms of routine work behaviour. This can be accomplished with a focus on people involvement, continuous improvement, process simplification, commitment, trust, respect, fairness, and doing it right for the first time, among other things. Once a sustainable implementation is visible, a comfortable company culture will evolve.

Secondly, we have to identify the focus areas that we like to work on to support our values and principles. Focus areas could be, for instance, the stakeholder structure. Once the focus is defined, we have to work on our points of action for improving performance.

Finally, we have to empower our people with the right training and the appropriate toolsets. This will increase competency in the organisation. We have to move away from an old school approach and empower people to a far greater extent because once people are empowered, they will be motivated enough to help themselves. Once we have that in place, people will be able to work systematically and successfully on continuous improvement. Success will create personal growth, personal growth will create passion, and passion will create motivation.

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