Combating employee dissatisfaction through Mind Mapping

Challenge

For about a year or so I have been working at a factory, which produced

canned fruit, as a Chemical Engineer assistant and a growing problem that we faced

was the growing dissatisfaction of the workers there. I was tasked with finding the

main reasons for why this behavior was displayed and potential solutions to the

problem. One of the hurdles that we had to combat is the sheer number of workers

with different desires and needs. For that reason alone it was not possible that we

interviewed every single worker. So we decided to interview workers from every

possible position from the night guard to the operators.

Selection

We decided to use the mind mapping design tool which could categorize

people not only as mere workers but as living breathing beings with motivations and

various needs. Since it was also impossible to interview every single worker in depth

creating different categories of workers was a solid way to understand their growing

dissatisfaction.

Application

After randomly selecting some workers for the interviews, we made them

complete a quiz beforehand. That quiz asked some general questions regarding the

characteristics of the interviewee (e.g. age, sex etc) and their position in the factory.

After that we collected the answers we interviewed each one separately for 10 – 20

minutes each and encouraged them to take notes of their daily life from waking up to

leaving the factory.  After a week of taking notes we interviewed them once again and

we were able to categorize each one.

Insight & Approach

The categories of the mind mapping helped us understand the people’s

willingness to work provided the dissatisfaction that they already had. With mind

mapping we found out that people were having a hard time remaining interested in

their position after working there for a great amount of time. That gave us a clear

signal that we should make a rotation of positions every two years or so, so that

people have new experiences and have a deeper understanding of the factory and how

it works. Moreover, the often changes in the hours of the operations of the factory

made the daily lifestyle a lot more unstable and made it harder for the workers to also

focus on other facits of their lifestyle such as family and friends. Furthermore, the

cleanliness of the factory and the overall pay did not meet the expectations of the

people which also made it harder to work there.

As an approach to this challenge mind mapping was crucial. Through using

that tool we now had the basis for a new era for the factory. After solving the existing

problems we saw a growth in employee satisfaction and we decided that the

application of mind mapping should be applied every two years so that we can

monitor changes in employee satisfaction levels and define new problems that may

arise before they get too big to compat.

