For Amanda Saam, the path to greater financial security and better career prospects ran through Somerset (KY) Community College’s Industrial Maintenance Technology program. Saam, 36, graduated from the program in May, and after a summer busy with both job-hunting and spending time with her 13-year-old daughter, she started a job as a maintenance technician at Hitachi in August.
What do today’s industrial production workers want? Good pay, yes: Survey respondents identified it as the top factor that would affect their stay-or-go decisions. But the importance of two other factors in particular—ample career development opportunities and work-life balance—can’t be overstated.
With respect to the first: “A lot of the retaining piece is, once someone comes in, not to say, ‘Oh, they’re really good; I don’t have to do anything now,’ ” says Elizabeth Williams Taylor, a supply chain black belt at DuPont and a region governor for the Society of Women Engineers. “It’s taking the time to understand, regardless of what you hired them in for…what their goals are.”
“Everyone wants to make a difference,” notes Des-Case’s Espinosa. Helping employees—Millennials in particular—see how and why their work matters and how their contribution can continue to evolve can encourage them to stay. That has major cost-savings implications for employers, who are eager to ensure that their training investments don’t walk out the door after a few months. “I don’t think people realize how important work is to people when it comes to morale, general happiness,” Espinosa says.
And yes, says Williams Taylor, some employees will want to spend their entire career as a mechanic. “But that’s not everyone,” she notes. “And if you make that assumption, if you have someone that’s really talented and you just leave them on the side and say, ‘Well they’re really good and they know what to do; give them lots of autonomy,’ but you spend no time finding out what they’re really interested in, chances are they’re not going to stick around.”
Career development for employees doesn’t always have to mean sending them for paid training, Williams Taylor points out. “There are a lot of things you can do that don’t necessarily require money,” she says. For example, one-on-one conversations with a manager are vital to gauge an employee’s interests and to figure out with whom the manager can connect the employee in order to help forge a path toward meeting employee goals.
Adds Des-Case’s Espinosa: “Your people need to grow, and when management is cognizant of that and they have a plan for their employees, what ends up happening is growth and tenure, and then at the two-year point, when they’re finally trained to where they need to be, instead of leaving, they stay, and they start to add significant value to the business.”
Espinosa notes that a lack of development opportunities is one of the top reasons job applicants he’s interviewing cite for leaving their current employer. “When management stops having a plan for their people, people look for someone who has a plan for them,” he says.
Respecting employees’ interests means acknowledging and embracing their outside-of-work priorities, too, and doing more than paying lip service to work-life balance. Plant Services survey respondents rated work-life balance as their second-most-important factor when deciding whether to stay with a company, and more than 80% said it’s a major factor for them in deciding where to work in the first place—and that’s from a respondent base dominated by baby boomers (ages 51 to 70) and Gen Xers (ages 35 to 50).
Sure, most industrial production jobs don’t allow for flex time or work-from-home opportunities. That doesn’t mean, however, that manufacturers can’t do more to meet employees halfway when it comes to balancing work and home priorities.
“If I’m an operator, I can’t work from home; that’s granted,” Williams Taylor says. “But maybe looking at your shift schedules—are your shift schedules maximizing the time your employees can be home with their families? Do you even have to run shifts at all?”
Base vacation time and paid leave matter, too. Giving employees the chance to pursue their non-work priorities and off-the-job passions can go a long way in keeping them around. Williams Taylor points to companies that offer employees a six-week, use-it-or-lose-it vacation block every three to five years—“which is fantastic, because you never know what your employees like to do on the side,” she says. “I worked with a lot of hunters (in a previous plant role), and I think some of them would have gone nuts if every three to five years they could have had a six-week hunting season.”
Everybody in
GE’s recent “What’s the matter with Owen?” series of recruiting commercials smartly captures the evolution of what it means to work for an industrial production company. In one spot, titled “The Hammer,” new, young GE hire Owen receives from his proud dad a sledgehammer that Owen’s grandfather had used on the job. Owen clarifies that while GE does make powerful machines, in his role, he’ll be writing the code that allows machines to talk to each other. His father then mocks him, suggesting that Owen can’t lift the hammer, while Owen’s mother offers assurances that even though their son won’t be physically building anything, he’ll still “change the world.” GE’s tagline at the end of the spot: “Get yourself a world-changing job.”
The slyly subversive ad hits on the head the fact that a huge breadth of talent is needed within modern industrial companies. For employers, it’s no small challenge to create a cooperative rather than antagonistic work environment—to foster respect between different functional teams and among workers with widely varying backgrounds.