The elephant on the manufacturing floor, Part 3

This is the third in a 3-part series of emails Erin sent out to the Syte mailing list. Manufacturing employment has become such a critical topic, we felt it was important to give context to the challenges and provide a jumping-off point for conversation — so we have decided to publish this email series as articles. As you read this series, we encourage you to reach out to Erin on LinkedIn and share your thoughts and ideas.

I’ve been looking at the topic of manufacturing employment through the lenses of the 3 Cs: connection, collaboration and communication.

Without fail, I’ve seen positive results in every business scenario where these three things are practiced intentionally. It only makes sense to use these three lenses to tackle the increasingly urgent issues of finding enough skilled people to fill staffing needs, improving engagement among production employees, and reducing turnover in the manufacturing environment.

And I don’t say “increasingly urgent” lightly.

SHRM (the Society for Human Resource Management) said the following long before the COVID crisis — and you can imagine how much bigger the challenge is now that the pandemic has impacted manufacturing around the world:

“In the manufacturing arena, recruiting employees is harder now than at any time during the past nine years … In fact, one-third of HR professionals in manufacturing have said in recent months that they can’t fill an open position.”

We’re coming to the end of my thought experiment around manufacturing employment, and there’s one C left to consider as we seek to find solutions — and that’s communication.

Manufacturing Employment: Communication for Better Alignment

No matter how great a leader you are, how connected you are to what’s going on with your people, or how well you collaborate, if you’re not communicating, your people and your organization are not aligned.

Especially critical topics to communicate about in a manufacturing environment are:

• Practices
• Policies
• Development plans
• State of the company

Let’s quickly look at each of these areas for communication opportunities.

Practices

Your people can’t read minds. Communicate what you’re doing at the leadership level that may impact them — and do it transparently and in a timely manner.

Consider what we talked about in the first email in this series: sending surveys out to your people to connect better with their everyday realities. As a few of our manufacturing clients have noted in their own businesses in recent years, it’s critical to have a (timely) plan for sharing why you’re conducting the survey, responding to the feedback, and communicating your intentions and actions. When you don’t take the time to communicate, the surveys will backfire on you and make things worse from a trust perspective.

Policies

You can’t expect your people to follow policies they don’t know about. And you can expect pushback on policies people don’t understand. This goes for production employees — but it equally applies to people in management and supervisory roles.

For these leadership roles, it’s also important to communicate your people management philosophy, and how organizational policies and practices align with that philosophy. Remaining aligned at the upper and middle levels makes it easier to improve alignment at the production level.

Development plans

It’s clear how communicating practices and policies can improve the employee experience and make it easier to attract and retain seasoned staff. Where I see the biggest breakpoint in communication, though, is around development plans. Especially technology plans.

Technology is one of the biggest factors changing the manufacturing landscape today, and it will impact virtually everything for employees going forward. Each employment level is touched by the evolution of technology. Recruitment and retention plans must be aligned with technology plans to be effective — and technology plans must be communicated to employees to open up opportunities for upskilling and apprenticeships.

I think this infographic from Deloitte says it all.

To keep job descriptions, staffing plans and training policies up to date, it’s important to communicate the tech roadmap to HR leaders — and keep communicating it as the roadmap evolves.

State of the company

This is from our insightful partner John Madsen at Black Line Group, and I couldn’t agree more:

“Employees at all levels appreciate feeling like they are a part of the team and knowing that what they do contributes to the overall success of the company. Consider sharing monthly P&L data and holding regular communication meetings to share important company updates. Provide opportunities for employees to share feedback and ideas too. The more you treat them as equals, the more they will act and feel like it.”

In Summary …

Connection, collaboration and communication are how people come together and problems get solved. Never have I seen a more important challenge to apply this to than manufacturing employment.

Once again, I’m looking to you to share your thoughts, ideas and experiences around this. Let’s put our heads together and be a part of the solution. Generations of employees will benefit.

Read the rest of the series here:

Addressing the Elephant in on the Manufacturing Floor, Part 1

The Elephant on the Manufacturing Floor, Part 2