15+ Employee Engagement Ideas for the Manufacturing Industry

We know from decades of industry research—both within manufacturing and across the broader workforce—what truly drives employee engagement. People want to feel supported, valued, connected to their colleagues, and confident that their work has meaning. When those needs are met, employees don’t just show up—they stay loyal, motivated, and energized.

Unsurprisingly, building a culture that achieves all these objectives is much easier said than done. Many manufacturing companies have made real progress, yet challenges like high turnover, frontline manager burnout, and low morale still persist in the industry.

It’s not easy to know exactly which gaps exist in your organization’s culture and where your strengths lie—which is why engagement can’t just be a one-time initiative. It requires ongoing measurement, reflection, and action.

The first step is understanding where your organization stands today. Once you identify the gaps, you can choose the right strategies to close them—whether that’s launching safety missions, providing personalized well-being plans, or celebrating years of service.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to do all this. We’ll cover:

• The science-backed drivers of engagement in the manufacturing industry—and how to measure and quantify them in your workplace.
• Over 15 tried-and-tested employee engagement ideas in the manufacturing industry—from well-being programs and recognition initiatives to safety campaigns.
• Industry-specific challenges and considerations to keep in mind when designing engagement strategies.
• The best practices for developing programs that align with your business goals and deliver measurable results.

Finally, we’ll show you how Terryberry’s end-to-end employee engagement platform can help you put these ideas into action—with tools for employee listening, recognition, rewards, and wellness, all in one place. World-leading manufacturers such as Unilever, Ford, and Land Rover use Terryberry to drive employee engagement.

 

What Drives Employee Engagement in the Manufacturing Industry?

After working closely with manufacturing organizations of all sizes, we’ve identified the same key factors as drivers of employee engagement and retention. The most successful teams focus on:

• Purpose and pride in the work. Manufacturing employees stay engaged when they understand how their role contributes to production goals, customer outcomes, and overall company success.
• Feeling valued and appreciated. Recognition has a clear impact on morale. When people feel seen, appreciated, and rewarded for the work they put in, motivation and loyalty increase.
• Opportunities to grow. Frontline workers are more invested when they have clear advancement paths, skill-building opportunities, and leaders who support their development.
• A strong workplace culture. Engagement improves when teams feel connected to their peers, communicate well across shifts, support one another, and feel part of a shared mission rather than working in isolation.
• Work that fits their life outside the facility. Employees tend to be more committed when scheduling and workload expectations allow them to manage life outside of work without constant strain.
• Managers who coach, communicate, and provide support. Every highly engaged team we have seen has strong frontline leadership. Managers who set expectations clearly, provide feedback, and recognize effort create a work environment where people want to stay.

These factors match what we have seen across hundreds of manufacturing organizations. Working with three independent PhD researchers, we combined real workforce data with proven engagement principles to develop our own framework for understanding what truly drives engagement and retention.

This framework, known as the culture model, uses six key indicators to measure the strength of an organization's employee experience.

Each indicator highlights a specific aspect of engagement. For example:

• Employees feel empowered when they have the tools and support they need to excel in their work.
• People feel a strong sense of purpose when they see how their work and values align with company goals.

While knowing about the factors that drive engagement is important, this knowledge alone doesn’t help you take action. You’ll need to go a step further and identify the factors that specifically affect your workforce (or specific groups of employees).

For example, if new hires leave early, it may be due to a lack of belonging. If frontline managers are churning at higher-than-usual rates, this could indicate limited growth or unclear development paths.

The culture model and baseline survey help you pinpoint these patterns so you know exactly where to focus your engagement efforts. It uses 38 questions that map to the six indicators within the model.

The survey results show where engagement is strong and where employees may need more support. You can also compare these findings with retention data (such as eNPS) to understand which groups are most at risk of leaving and why.

For example, groups with the lowest eNPS may also score low on equity, indicating that people leave because of limited opportunities to move up in the company. These insights help you set clear priorities and establish the KPIs that guide your broader employee engagement strategy.

 

15+ Ideas to Boost Engagement and Retention in the Manufacturing Industry

If you are exploring employee engagement initiatives for your manufacturing workforce, you don't need to start from scratch. Many proven programs already help companies strengthen morale and reduce employee turnover. The key is choosing the right ones and personalizing them to your teams, facilities, and operational goals.

 

Meaningfully Recognize and Reward People: 5 Ideas to Consider

Recognizing people for their contributions and achievements directly increases employee retention and engagement. Employee recognition programs are also really versatile—you can tailor them to various objectives, such as celebrating loyalty, promoting core values, encouraging cross-team collaboration, and more.

Here are some popular recognition programs to consider:

 

Manager-Driven Recognition

Empowering managers motivates frontline workers to participate and shows that leadership truly values their contributions and achievements. Managers are the best people to weigh in on which contributions and achievements to recognize people for, since they directly oversee their team’s operations.

You can implement these programs by allocating budgets for managers to recognize people on the spot and for special occasions. For example, they can recognize team members for going above and beyond in their work, helping out a peer, driving safely, and making deliveries on time during the holiday season.

 

Peer Recognition

Peer recognition programs empower your whole workforce to champion your culture. Employees can recognize each other’s contributions—such as helping unload inventory, mentoring someone who’s taken on new responsibilities, or demonstrating the company’s core values.

These programs can increase people’s sense of belonging and purpose by making them feel valued by their peers and uniting everyone behind shared goals.

 

Nomination-Based Programs

These programs help frontline workers highlight their team’s biggest contributors for recognition. Some common types of nomination-based programs in manufacturing include:

• Team player MVP: Celebrate employees who consistently put the team’s success above their own. For example, a machine operator who consistently steps in to cover shifts or helps troubleshoot issues for colleagues. These programs reinforce a culture of teamwork and reduce silos between departments like production, maintenance, and quality control.
• Quality hero: Recognize workers who go above and beyond to ensure product quality and safety, such as those who regularly detect and report defects early. These programs motivate everyone to take ownership of quality and reduce the likelihood of costly issues such as batch recalls.
• Mentorship MVP: Recognize employees who regularly guide, support, and develop their peers. For example, a senior technician who trains apprentices on complex machinery, or a line leader who coaches new hires on safety and efficiency. Recognizing their contributions helps create a culture of continuous learning.

How Terryberry Supports Meaningful Recognition

Terryberry’s employee recognition software lets you set up manager, peer, and nomination-based recognition programs that run on autopilot and engage your entire workforce.

Our system supports both monetized and unmonetized recognition. You can allocate budgets for an entire program (e.g., peer recognition) and specify how those budgets are spent. For example, you could allocate 10 points per peer nomination and allow managers to award points at their discretion.

Recognition moments are broadcast on Terryberry’s social hub for the whole company to see. Colleagues can engage by liking or commenting on the posts, or even ‘boosting’ them to award additional points to the recipient.

 

Terryberry’s culture hub connects employees across different teams, departments, and locations.

 

Meanwhile, Terryberry’s manager dashboards make it easy to track budgets, monitor unused points, and review team recognition, such as the most and least recognized employees and the most common reasons for recognition.

Celebrate Wins and Milestones Together: 5 Ideas to Consider

Performance and milestone programs offer another way to recognize people’s wins and achievements, and you can adjust them to match specific goals, such as boosting new-hire retention or motivating people to follow quality control practices.

Here are some programs to consider:

 

Years of Service Awards Programs

Employee Service Awards programs celebrate employees at key tenure milestones, such as their first, third, fifth, and tenth years, recognizing their loyalty and contributions. The format can vary based on your workforce, budget, and goals.

Some companies send gifts or award redeemable points on each anniversary and highlight the achievement on the company’s recognition platform or intranet. Others hold in-person ceremonies where senior leaders present custom awards such as plaques, trophies, or jewelry and acknowledge each person’s impact.

We cover everything you need to know to launch a years of service awards program here.

 

Short Service Milestones

While years-of-service award programs are effective for boosting long-term loyalty, many businesses we’ve worked with have also benefited from shorter service milestone programs. They’re especially useful in industries like manufacturing, where new-hire turnover is often high.

You can create these programs to support new hires throughout the onboarding process and help them integrate with your company in their first year by:

• Setting regular milestones, including first day, week, month, and then sixty days, ninety days, half year, and one year milestones.
• Customize each milestone to specific objectives or outcomes. So maybe the first-week milestone commemorates the completion of their training in machine operation safety, personal protective equipment (PPE), emergency procedures, and OSHA standards.

We’ve helped organizations reduce new hire turnover by up to 50% with these programs.

 

Performance Milestones

You can personalize these programs to celebrate both people’s individual contributions and the team's collective achievements.

For example, you might celebrate people with sustained accident-free streaks. Or the “million-mile award,” which recognizes truck drivers for completing their first million miles, is popular among manufacturing companies with in-house logistics teams.

You can celebrate shared wins by teams, facilities, or the entire organization with dedicated milestone programs, such as:

• Output achievements. Such as a first run, 1 million units, and a new SKU ramp. These are team-wide celebrations where you can reward line and shift teams.
• Quality milestones. Celebrate sustained quality gains, such as consecutive inspection passes or a reduction in defect rate by the target percent.

How Terryberry Automates Milestone Celebrations

Terryberry’s employee engagement platform lets you configure any type of milestone program, from birthdays and service anniversaries to performance milestones. Employees can easily see upcoming milestones at any time from our app:

Our heritage awards—which we’ve been manufacturing for over 100 years—are a popular choice for milestone awards programs. You can tailor these awards to your program and the recipient, with engravings, different colored gems, custom designs, and more.

Alternatively, you can set up custom shopping portals with our rewards system and allow employees to choose their own rewards. Using our system, you can either:

• Allocate a fixed number of points for each milestone that employees can exchange for rewards. For instance, you might award 100 points for a first-year anniversary, 300 points for a third-year anniversary, and 500 points for a fifth-year anniversary.
• Set up “recognition levels” with dedicated reward tiers. For example, employees with three years of service might unlock a $50 tier, while employees with ten years of service can choose from rewards valued at $150.

Listen to Employees and Make Them Feel Heard

Making employees feel heard makes them feel valued and connected to the organization. It’s not enough to just hear people out though—understanding their sentiments and taking action is key.

A formal employee listening program uses a combination of different surveys—qualitative and quantitative—to collect feedback at the right time. As we discussed earlier, the engagement baseline survey measures employee engagement and eNPS surveys predict churn.

But there are dozens of scenario-specific surveys, such as exit and stay surveys, disaster response surveys, pulse surveys, and others, to help you collect different types of feedback. And while surveys form the backbone of employee listening programs, you can gather more context using different methods.

For example, it’s worth talking to managers about their teams and the challenges they face, hosting 1:1s with employees to collect feedback, and setting up an anonymous suggestions box for people to share their opinions.

The insights from these channels can also inform your survey strategy. For example, talking to managers may have made you aware of a common problem that needs investigation.

Read more: Our complete guide to continuous employee listening covers everything you need to know about developing, launching, and scaling these programs.

Measure What Matters with Terryberry’s Be Heard

Manufacturing businesses use Be Heard, Terryberry’s employee listening solution, to quantify employee engagement, track sentiments, predict churn, and uncover actionable insights. Our system allows you to:

• Collect insights using science-backed surveys, including employee engagement and retention surveys, across multiple channels.
• Automate survey processing so you can quickly analyze responses and take action. The software handles time-consuming administrative tasks such as sending reminders and follow-ups.
• Collect employee suggestions through anonymous feedback surveys.
• Take action with customized programs supported by Terryberry’s integrated recognition, rewards, and wellness tools.

“Terryberry was the only solution that helped us transform raw data into concrete decisions that impact the lives of our employees, our business, and our community. That's what's really driven our loyalty. With Terryberry, we can now spot long-term trends and see the impact of our choices over the past 5 years. This insight allows us to make informed decisions and address issues proactively.”

Promote Workplace Safety: Ideas to Customize Your Programs

Engaged employees are more likely to follow safety protocols and report potential hazards. When people feel connected to their work and understand how their actions contribute to a safer facility, overall safety performance improves.

There are several ways to promote safety in the workplace:

 

Safety Committees with Representatives

Create a structured forum for discussing concerns, reviewing safety incidents, and recommending improvements. Then, include representatives from different departments (production, maintenance, quality, HR) and a mix of frontline workers and management to get balanced perspectives.

The committee you set up can:

• Identify hazards and propose corrective actions.
• Review accident/near-miss reports and track follow-up.
• Develop and update safety policies and training programs.
• Act as a communication bridge between employees and leadership.

A safety committee empowers employees by giving them a voice in safety decisions and encouraging them to take ownership of safety practices. It also facilitates cross-department collaboration, reducing blind spots.

 

Safety Incentive Programs

Motivate employees to consistently follow safety protocols by recognizing them on the spot for positive safety behaviors such as wearing PPE, reporting unsafe conditions, double-checking lockout and tagout procedures before maintenance, or completing required safety modules.

You can also build safety incentive programs around shared goals, such as zero-accident streaks for a team or facility over a month, a quarter, or a full year.

 

Support People’s Physical and Mental Well-Being

Employee well-being directly contributes to engagement, motivation, and retention. Studies show that more than 40 percent of voluntary departures are linked to burnout or stress, and burned-out employees are far more likely to look for a new job.

Since manufacturing workers have long shifts and physically demanding roles, supporting their well-being is especially important. We recommend a proactive approach that helps people build healthy habits and strengthen their mental resilience before burnout becomes a risk.

Here are some engagement ideas to support your team’s overall well-being:

• Wellness challenges: Step, hydration, sleep, and healthy eating challenges motivate teams to build healthy habits together.
• Mental health support: Offer access to awareness sessions, coaching, and one-on-one counseling or therapy through your employee care services.
• Employee seminars: Provide sessions on topics such as work-life balance, nutrition, or managing workplace stress.

How Terryberry’s Be Well Supports Employees’ Physical and Mental Well-Being

Staying healthy or seeking mental health support can easily slip through the cracks when your frontline teams are focused on getting through the workday.

That’s why we created Be Well, Terryberry’s built-in wellness platform, designed to proactively tackle fatigue and burnout by making wellness a natural part of people’s day-to-day lives.

Launching organization-wide wellness challenges turns hydration, sleep, and fitness into shared commitments that the entire team works toward, keeping everyone motivated and engaged.

Be Well supports employees’ physical, mental, and emotional well-being with:

• Wellness and activity challenges. Build healthy habits across your workforce with tailored challenges—including step, activity, hydration, and sleep. You can also design custom initiatives tailored to your goals, add personalized incentives, and allow workers to communicate via in-app discussion options.
• Gamification that keeps everyone motivated. Be Well delivers personalized performance metrics to each participant, and our system displays a shared leaderboard to encourage healthy competition.
• Tailored well-being plans. These support each employee’s specific needs, such as improving sleep cycles, eating better, staying hydrated, and managing stress.
• Personalized incentives. Reward top performers with a selection of wellness gifts, ranging from spa days to fitness trackers and exercise equipment.
• Expert-led wellness seminars and on-demand support. Be Well offers on-demand mental health support through 150+ audio guides covering 40+ topics. You can also schedule expert-led trainings for teams that need support with shared challenges.
• Detailed Wellness Analytics. Track participation metrics and employee performance across your wellness initiatives.

Give People the Right Opportunities and Support Their Growth

When employees feel supported in their roles and confident about their future at your company, they are more engaged and more likely to stay.

If your listening efforts reveal gaps in areas such as growth, development, or advancement, it may be time to invest in more structured learning and career opportunities for frontline workers. You might invest in initiatives like:

• Developing learning paths. Build clear development paths that align with career goals and company objectives. Start by identifying skill gaps through performance reviews or employee surveys, then map out progressive training modules from introductory to advanced levels.
• Offering courses through an LMS. Make learning part of everyday routines by using an LMS that supports mobile access, interactive content, and logins that do not require corporate email accounts.
• Peer support training. Pair experienced employees with newer or less experienced team members for structured mentoring that includes shadowing, hands-on practice, and feedback.
• Strengthening new hire training. Go beyond a standard onboarding checklist and create an experience that helps new employees integrate into your culture. Include culture and values education, safety training, shadowing opportunities, and role-specific development resources.

Book a demo to see how Terryberry helps manufacturing teams increase employee engagement with personalized programs.

 

Engage Your Whole Workforce with Terryberry’s Employee Engagement Platform

Terryberry is an all-in-one employee engagement platform for manufacturing that lets you launch and scale personalized programs for employee listening, recognition, incentives, safety, and wellness.

Our platform’s native features intuitively support all the best practices we’ve covered—such as tailoring programs to strategic goals, meeting people where they work, smart gamification, and continuous improvement.

 

Listen to Employees and Quantify Employee Engagement

Terryberry’s employee listening tool, Be Heard, offers everything you need to collect feedback, track employee sentiments, investigate root causes, and measure impact.

Be Heard lets you:

• Capture insights using the science-backed, ready-made surveys. Our extensive survey library includes employee engagement, satisfaction, retention, and scenario-specific surveys such as exit, stay, disaster response, integration, and dozens more.
• Run continuous employee listening programs on autopilot. Be Heard delivers surveys across your preferred communication channels, automatically processes results, supports automated scheduling and reminders, and lets you track participants in one place.
• Build confidence with anonymity protection. Our 6-response minimum threshold means that admins can’t drill down into responses for groups with fewer than 6 participants (although the data is still included in aggregate scores)—and third-party encryption ensures individual responses can’t be traced.
• Deliver surveys across multiple channels to maximize participation. Be Heard makes surveys easily accessible to your whole workforce with options to deliver them via desktop, mobile app, QR codes, links, and even paper.
• Analyze results to uncover actionable insights. Be Heard’s analytics dashboard supports multiple score views, so you can analyze the same data from different angles and quickly spot problem areas using visual response distribution charts with scoring from -100 to +100. You can filter responses using participant filters—including ones for departments, age, gender, generations, facilities, job titles, and seniority levels.
• Track employee participation in real-time. Monitor completion rates with breakdowns by department, location, and tenure.
• Benchmark results against competitors. Powered by OpenAI, the analytics dashboard automatically compares your aggregate eNPS score to industry and company size averages.

Take Action with Tailored Engagement Programs

 

Terryberry offers all the necessary tools—frontline-friendly participation options, employee gamification, native rewards management, configurable milestones, and custom nominations—under one roof. So you can:

• Launch engagement programs that bridge gaps and drive your strategic objectives. Our platform supports all types of recognition, incentive, wellness, and safety programs, and you can customize nominations, milestones, and rewards for each one.
• Engage your whole workforce with inclusive programs. We bring your engagement programs directly to your frontline employees, with desktop and mobile apps, integrations with MS Teams and Outlook, and various offline participation options. Our team works with you to design programs tailored to the unique microcultures in your organization—whether that means running nominations on a bulletin board or setting up peer recognition on a kiosk.
• Motivate people with the incentives they’ll love. Terryberry lets you set up points-based reward systems, add personalized incentives to your programs, and manage budgets and orders in one place. Our partnership with Amazon Business brings the largest selection of rewards in the U.S. market to Terryberry customers, and our Premium Awards catalog lets you build custom shopping portals and tap into our global network of fulfillment partners.
• Support employees’ physical and mental well-being. With Be Well, you can launch activity and custom wellness challenges and support employees with personalized wellness plans, on-demand well-being content, and expert-led wellness seminars.

Measure Impact, Centralize Budgets, and Prove ROI

Terryberry centralizes data across all your engagement programs—listening, recognition, and wellness—combining participation metrics with engagement indicators and eNPS scores. This means you can accurately measure the impact of each program on retention and specific engagement indicators.

From Terryberry’s analytics dashboard, you can use participant filters and different score views to slice and dice data and uncover actionable insights.

For example, you can:

• Track the impact of manager recognition on frontline worker engagement.
• See if your wellness program increased manager well-being scores.
• Compare eNPS scores for highly recognized vs. underrecognized employees.

These insights can help you build a business case for each program by demonstrating its unique impact across different cohorts.

 

Getting Started with Terryberry

Terryberry consolidates your entire employee engagement stack into a single platform, offering employee listening, recognition, rewards, and wellness tools.

Our admin fees are 30–40% below the typical market average, and our transparent pricing model offers additional savings:

 

 

Book a personalized demo and start launching tailored employee engagement programs with Terryberry.

 

Build a More Engaged Manufacturing Workforce

Employee engagement in manufacturing comes with unique challenges, including busy schedules, physically demanding work, distributed teams, and high turnover among new hires and managers. This all makes it harder to build a company culture where employees feel connected, valued, and engaged at work.

With a single platform to manage recognition, rewards, wellness challenges, safety initiatives, and career-development milestones, you can keep employees motivated and reinforce the behaviors that drive performance and retention.

Schedule a personalized demo to see exactly how Terryberry helps ensure that your employees feel heard, valued, and motivated at work.