A bodyshop is first and foremost a team, and like any team, ensuring everyone is pulling in the same direction is critical to success.
Disparaged, unmotivated, and just confused employees can make even the most efficient shop a miserable mess for everyone involved, especially customers! Therefore making sure your entire team is working together effectively and in sync is the best way to improve your shop’s overall productivity, your employees morale, and even customer satisfaction.
The most important single item to ensuring a well oiled team is communication.
Not just of repair tasks to complete, but in their order, priority, specific requests and where help/support will be needed. Employees who don’t have a good understanding of what they are doing, or why they are doing it are likely to either do the incorrect thing, or worse, nothing at all! This is primarily where leaders and communication tools come into play to streamline the communication process and keep everyone aligned throughout the shop.
But communication takes time and effort from managers and team leaders.
Writing up tasks, taking in jobs, setting up teams and checking on schedules is a time drain on any business. So ensuring that your shop has the ideal tools to empower leadership and communicate clearly with staff through task assignment, time tracking and kanban job management is critical to getting the most out of your team.
What tools do you use most often to effectively communicate with staff? Let us and others know in the comments below!
If you picked #4 (too many verbal instructions): what’s the one thing that gets missed most often — status updates, parts ordering, QC notes, or next-step handoffs?
Drop it below. I’m collecting the top pain points and sharing simple fixes.