Manufacturing organizations often promote their best frontline operators. A machinist who hits every quality target, a line lead who never misses a shift, a technician everyone trusts: these are the people who get tapped for supervisor roles. Many step into people management with no preparation for the job, a pattern manufacturing HR leaders call the "accidental manager" problem. When Perceptyx polled HR and talent leaders on the subject at a recent manufacturing roundtable, the two most common manager development gaps were managers who complete training but do not apply it consistently, and no structured development program at all. Solenis, the 2026 EX Impact Award winner for Learning and Development, shared how it closed both gaps, and leaders from other manufacturers described what is working at their organizations.
Solenis, a leading global provider of water and hygiene solutions operating in more than 160 countries, grew from roughly 6,000 employees to 23,000 through two major acquisitions in three years. When the company moved its annual culture survey to Perceptyx in 2023, the results showed inconsistent manager scores from region to region, with the weakest results concentrated in growth and development and performance management items at the supervisor and first-level manager tiers.
Acquisitions compounded the problem. Two sizable companies with different cultures and different leadership traditions were merging, and the survey data confirmed the need for a common approach to people management across the combined organization. Our Solenis customer story documents how the company treated manager effectiveness as the central lever for engagement and retention from that point forward.
Solenis built a set of programs matched to different populations rather than a single training. LEAD, a 90-minute monthly session open to every employee, pairs 15 to 20 minutes of an internal leader discussing a topic such as time management, communication, or coaching with 60 minutes of vendor-led skill instruction. Because accidental managers are usually high performers promoted from within, opening LEAD to everyone reaches future supervisors before they take the role.
GEMStone, the flagship program, is a five-month journey for first- and second-line managers focused on fundamental people leadership skills, co-created with an external vendor and built around Solenis cultural beliefs and leadership competencies. The company set a target of reaching all people managers within three years and almost hit 90% by the end of third year. When managers reported that GEMStone's time commitment was too demanding, the company responded with Northlight, a shorter-format program that empowers leaders to drive performance through greater self-awareness, purposeful leadership, and offers practical tools for leading with clarity and care. DirectImpact, a director-level program launched this year, extends the portfolio upward, ensuring that a development offering now exists at every level of leadership.
Solenis schedules training cohorts around plant shift patterns, offers GEMStone in seven languages with new facilitators onboarded for each, and expanded its culture survey from seven languages to 23. The company owns the intellectual property for its programs, which lets it translate content and update modules annually based on the newest survey results. Cohorts also outlast the programs: participants from different countries continue trading advice in group chats long after the final session, so managers can turn to peers for practical guidance when new problems come up.
Solenis measures its programs at multiple points:
The company then checks the culture survey itself. Employees reporting to managers who completed GEMStone in the prior year scored higher across survey categories, including 3 points higher on engagement and 5 points higher on clarity of future vision, compared with peers whose managers had not yet completed the program.
The team also anticipated the selection-effect objection: maybe the managers who volunteered first were already the strong ones. To rule that out, Solenis compared trained managers against their own scores before the training and found the same improvement pattern within individuals over time. The company recorded the following benefits:
Participation in the Solenis culture survey rose from 87% to 96% in three years, and 99.8% of people managers submitted a culture action plan last year. Solenis credits both numbers to executive sponsorship and manager accountability, and to employees watching their feedback produce action year after year. The CEO discusses the culture survey throughout the year, requests results the moment the survey closes, and added three of his own questions to last year's assessment. The State of Employee Listening 2026 research quantifies why that follow-through matters: 71% of employees say their organization shares survey results, but only 51% report that actual improvements followed. Closing that gap is what sustains participation.
Accountability at Solenis runs through every people manager. Year-over-year movement on manager-specific survey items factors into each manager's performance rating. Managers below a threshold Manager Index score receive additional review support from HR business partners, while plant leaders make participation practical by letting employees arrive early or take breaks during shifts to complete the survey. The company also learned a language lesson the hard way: after omitting one language from a mid-year pulse check, a large group of manufacturing employees in the affected region declined to participate. Solenis added the language to the annual survey and now reviews language coverage wherever it has large plant populations, offering the survey in a language those employees can use.
Linking survey results to performance ratings carries a known risk: managers may pressure their teams to score them favorably. Solenis guards against it in several ways:
Two diagnostic checks help any organization spot score inflation. Healthy survey data shows variance across managers as uniformly high manager scores suggest employees are inflating their ratings. If written comments contradict numeric scores, employees are likely softening their numbers under pressure. Both checks rely on data the organization already collects.
At a large beverage bottler operating across 14 states, every newly appointed leader goes through a three-part "new leader experience": a call with HR business partners about what leadership means in that environment, a two-day in-person session at company headquarters, and self-paced e-learning afterward. Getting warehouse and production supervisors into the same room is difficult to schedule and worth the effort, since in-person cohorts push participants to engage with the material and each other in a way self-paced modules cannot.
Reinforcement between survey cycles is the next frontier for several manufacturers, including a semiconductor equipment maker now evaluating Activate nudges to keep action planning alive throughout the year. The common internal objection is fatigue: nudges risk becoming one more thing managers receive.
Two practices can address nudge fatigue before it happens. First, pilot with a subset of leaders rather than launching organization-wide, then build the broader business case from the pilot's results. Second, use AI Coach as a practice environment for new managers, who can rehearse a first performance review or a difficult conversation with a low performer in real time; the tool can be configured for specific populations and trained on an organization's own policies and language. For the many organizations whose managers complete training but do not apply it consistently, in-flow reinforcement addresses the gap that a scheduled training calendar cannot: the three months between learning a skill and needing it.
The Solenis case demonstrates the power of a repeatable sequence:
Manufacturers looking to benchmark their own listening and development practices can read the 2026 manufacturing employee listening data, which found that 34% of manufacturing HR leaders cite manager talent and skills as the top barrier limiting their listening programs.
To see how Perceptyx connects listening data to manager development and in-flow reinforcement for frontline populations, schedule a demo with our team.