This isn’t quite a reason to break out the champagne. Currently, women account for around 47% of the general workforce, meaning the industry is still lagging behind many others. But it does, at least, provide a strong platform from which manufacturing companies can build a more gender-balanced future.

A whole new world: As for what’s driving this progress, there are several factors at play. Certainly, the perception of manufacturing as a dirty, dingy world is on the wane. Instead, word is spreading that the industry is now more about automation than perspiration. Meanwhile, the rigid technical jobs of the past have been replaced by more contemporary roles centered around innovation, problem-solving, adaptability and collaboration. These characteristics are, historically at least, more in line with what female workers look for in a career.

PROMOTED: In its own way, COVID-19 helped too. Despite the disruption to operations and supply chains, the pandemic shone new light on the vital role manufacturers play in our daily lives — everything from putting food on the table to providing vital medicines and household goods. This, in turn, has made more people (both male and female) consider the industry as somewhere they can build a meaningful long-term career.

There are other positive changes as well. The growing focus on teaming, experimentation, attention to detail and hybrid working is making manufacturing feel like a more modern and inclusive place to work for all. In education, STEM subjects are not the male-dominated environment they used to be and, as a result, we’re seeing more women take on roles in engineering, quality control, product design and more. And while there is still work to do when it comes to creating more gender-balanced management teams — currently only one in four manufacturing leaders is female — these figures too are heading in the right direction.

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The Labor Department on 8/30/22 reported there were a seasonally adjusted 11.2 million , up from the previous month’s upwardly revised 11 million. Job openings have remained elevated and above 10 million since the summer of 2021.

The number of times workers quit their jobs edged down to 4.2 million in July from the prior month’s 4.3 million. Layoffs and discharges fell slightly to 1.4 million in July from the prior month’s level. Hiring slowed slightly to 6.4 million, down from 6.5 million in June.

Many companies struggle with how to get the desired results from their greatest asset: people. The first action to begin proactively managing this asset is to stop the bleeding—stop turnover.

There is an analogy in medicine. When treating a medical trauma, the priority is to determine if the patient is bleeding, and if so, identify the source of the blood. Other issues are a distant second, because if the bleeding is not brought under control, the patient dies.

In organizations, it is clear if you have employee turnover. What is less clear though is what that turnover is costing your organization.

You can find no-cost employee turnover calculators online, which will help you get a handle on the cost of the churn. You may be surprised. Relatively small businesses of 250 employees can be spending in excess of $1 million a year, every year. That does not include the cost of business opportunities which you forego because of your turnover. These lost revenues can be many times more than the the price tag on turnover.

If the cost alarms you and you want to stop the bleeding, your next step is to determine the root causes of the turnover. Some of the most common reasons employees leave are:

• Disrespectful and difficult bosses;
• Lack of opportunities;
• Lack of professional development;
• Favoritism.

There are infinitely more reasons than that, and every employer has causes specific to its organization. It is a mistake for employers to look at other organizations and assume their causes for turnover are the same. You will lose time and money chasing the wrong causes.

Before you begin the work of identifying your causes, clarify for your organization the difference between a symptom and a cause.

A symptom points to the cause; employees will offer symptoms. Compensation, for example, is a symptom, although it is reported as a cause.

Brace yourself. It is more difficult to address causes than the problems that emerge from those causes (the symptoms), but the work is worth it.

Your payroll system can be a useful tool to start. It will give you objective facts. Focus on the departments that have high turnover. When talking to the managers of those departments, however, take what they say with a healthy dose of skepticism. Their explanations often are indirect slaps at departing employees.

Exit interviews are an easy tool, but they are mostly unreliable. Most departing employees are not candid about why they are leaving. They are going to tell you what they think you want to hear.

Engagement surveys can also be a good source if they are anonymous. If the employees do not feel secure, then they are no better than exit interviews.

Good managers will know the real reason someone is leaving. They have a communication system in place to gather these facts. Good managers often know the reasons employees in other departments are leaving as well.

In your typical department, there will be at least one employee who knows exactly why someone resigned. This is the best source of information. A communication system developed to reach these employees is invaluable. The higher in the organization the employees are communicating and feel secure, the better.

Management is now getting good objective information straight from frontline people. It is more reliable than information filtered by managers or individual agendas. This collection of information will help you define your root causes.

Clark A. Ingram is the founder and president of People Profits, LLC. People Profits is a financially focused human capital consulting firm. The firm specializes in helping clients in the three biggest issues confronting organizations: employee turnover, chronically open positions and the skills gap.

Nearly half of manufacturers said child-care constraints caused by the coronavirus made it difficult to recall furloughed workers or hire new ones in August, according to a survey by the Fed in Philadelphia.

Employers are responding by setting up day care options in workplaces and thinking creatively about schedules. At a metal fabrication plant in Milwaukee, three employees recently switched to the weekend shift—working three 12-hour days—to take care of children during the week.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Millions of low-paid workers’ lives are increasingly governed by software and algorithms. This was starkly illustrated by a report last week that Amazon.com tracks the productivity of its employees and regularly fires those who under-perform, with little human intervention.

“Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors,” a law firm representing Amazon said in a letter to the National Labor Relations Board, which was first reported by technology news site The Verge. Amazon was responding to a complaint that it had fired an employee from a Baltimore fulfillment center for federally protected activity, which could include union organizing. Amazon said the employee was fired for failing to meet productivity targets.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time. Software already screens resumes, recommends job applicants, schedules shifts and assigns projects. In the workplace, “sophisticated technology to track worker productivity on a minute-by-minute or even second-by-second basis is incredibly pervasive,” says Ian Larkin, a business professor at the University of California at Los Angeles specializing in human resources.

Industrial laundry services track how many seconds it takes to press a laundered shirt; on-board computers track truckers’ speed, gear changes and engine revolutions per minute; and checkout terminals at retailers report if the cashier is scanning items quickly enough to meet a preset goal. In every case, results are shared in real time with employees and used to determine who is terminated.

Weeding out under-performing employees is a function of management, and the roughly 10 percent termination rate at the Amazon center in Baltimore is “not unusually high,” Larkin said.

He said automating the discipline process “makes an already difficult job seem even more inhuman and undesirable. Dealing with these tough situations is one of the key roles of managers.”

A spokeswoman for Amazon said that “no one is terminated, coached or developed by a system,” but rather “managers make final decisions on all personnel matters.”

Source: Wall Street Journal