Today, I want to show you three critical steps you can take to resolve the recurring challenges in building & maintaining a productive maintenance team.
A functioning environment revolves around a simple premise – your teammates want to create improvements in the working environment from their daily activities.
If they’re currently stuck in what’s called “the negative present.” They’re facing recurring challenges that never seem to lift.
Your goal is to get to what’s known as “the positive future” – a world where meaningful & measurable improvements are taking place on a regular basis.
Your job as a leader is to show them how you’re working to bridge the gap between where they are today and where they want to be.
If you can do this, you’ll secure your position as a provider of stability, security and meaningful work.
Unfortunately… many maintenance leaders are bombarded by overwhelming set of complex challenges to resolve with continually limited resources.
It’s impossible to grow when all you see is shrinkage.
The walls you see closing in look a lot like the following…
– Retirement: Millions of skilled manufacturing workers have retired, and another two million will retire by 2028.
– Competition: Manufacturers face heavy competition for entry-level talent from warehouses, distribution centers, and delivery companies, which is feeding the e-commerce boom
– Labor Participation Rate (LPR): The LPR rate dropped from 67.2% in 2001 to 62.5% in January 2024.
– Bad image: Young people, their parents, and counselors do not consider manufacturing a good career. They have watched as multinational corporations outsource jobs and close plants for decades.
– Public education: Education is still focused on getting a college degree. Vocational training and the trades have been deemphasized for many years
The good news is that the retirement of 2 million people is not your problem to solve. The fact is, you only need to find 3 or 6 or maybe 20 technicians for your team to head off on a path to productivity. That’s far less than 2 Million. Especially when you consider 12.7 Million people are actively employed within US Manufacturing today. There has to be a way keep your best people engaged while finding 3-4 more good ones without the burden of reinventing an entire industry.
Here are 3 ways to adjust your course by improving your talent management formula:
Create an Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
In order to attract bright new practitioners, as well as ensure the engagement of your current team, you’ll have to create a proposition that underscores “what’s in it for them”
Building a strong Employee Value Proposition (EVP) involves a few simple steps:
1. Understand your employees: Conduct interviews to gather insights about what your employees value most about their work within your company. Listen to your team, they have the answers. Pick the 3-5 best insights and begin your EVP from here.
2. Identify key benefits: Highlight the unique benefits your company offers, such as career development opportunities, a positive work environment, competitive salaries, critical teammates or unique perks. Ask how these benefits stand in light of other jobs they’ve had in the past and what makes this one truly different & appealing.
3. Communicate your EVP: Once you have defined your EVP, communicate it clearly and consistently to both existing employees and potential candidates. This could be through your job postings, on your website, during interviews, and in internal communications. Weave this EVP into all future communication around why you’re doing what you do. Remember – change management involves saying the same thing over & over again until it’s an assumed reality.
How does an EVP work in hiring? We placed an ammonia refrigeration tech at a client of ours last year while competing against 2 other job offers from 2 competitive sites. How did we win? We knew our candidate wanted to grow and develop their career, so we were able to focus on the training and tuition reimbursement portion of our EVP. The other companies who made offers could have had similar growth opportunities available, yet they failed to demonstrate training as a differentiator – yielding us the win.
Farm More, Hunt Less
Many companies fail to maintain contact with past applicants and employees, missing out on a massive resource to pull from for future positions.
An applicant who was not a good fit for a previous role may be perfect for a new one that opens up. The common mistake is to dismiss these applicants altogether, failing to see their future value. Our past applicant database is the source of nearly 1/3 of all of the hires we do each year – so there’s a lot of value to be extracted here.
Here are three ways to maintain a talent pool for future use:
1. Keep an Organized Database: One of the most important steps in maintaining a talent pool is keeping a well-organized database of past applicants and employees. This database should include details such as their skills, qualifications, and feedback from their previous application or employment. Your company likely already has one that’s being ignored or underutilized.
2. Regular Communication: Stay in touch with past applicants and employees by sending occasional updates about the company, industry news, or available positions. This keeps people feeling informed and valued as a member of your community. Regular, meaningful, respectful messaging ensures your opportunities are front & center on the day your best candidates are ready to consider (or reconsider) a career move.
3. Personalized Engagement: Tailor your communication to each individual based on their interests and potential roles they could fill in the future. This could be in the form of personalized emails, newsletters, or social media interactions. This technique also positions you to receive valuable referrals because great people tend to know other great people.
Treat Your Hiring Process Like A Manufacturing Process
As an industrial leader, you’ve spent your career mastering process implementation. So here’s the good news about the hiring process – it is a process. Which means you have heaps of experience to make these changes a reality.
Here are six ways to take a strategy you already know and apply it to finding the right people for your team…
1. Map Out Your Process: Just as a manufacturing process begins with a clear plan of the production cycle; start your hiring process by outlining each step – from approving job descriptions to integrating new hires. This will give you a clear picture of your process and help identify potential bottlenecks.
2. Standardize Your Procedures: In your world, standard operating procedures (SOPs) ensure consistency and quality. Similarly, create SOPs for your hiring process – such as how to conduct an effective screening or what to highlight during plant tours – to ensure a consistent candidate experience.
3. Quality Control: As in production, quality control is crucial in hiring. Implement measures to assess the quality of your candidates at each stage of the process with behavioral interview questions or skills assessments. This will help you standardize the identification of high-quality candidates and reduce the risk of costly hiring mistakes.
4. Continuous Improvement: Just as you’re on the lookout for ways to eliminate defects from your equipment, continually refine your hiring process based on feedback and data. If certain interview questions aren’t providing useful information, replace them with ones that do.
5. Preventative Maintenance: In manufacturing, regular equipment checks prevent breakdowns. In hiring, preventative maintenance is done with regular reviews of your team’s tenure, engagement, average turnover rate and impending retirements to identify and address potential gaps before they become major problems.
6. Lean Hiring: Implement lean principles to eliminate waste in your hiring process. This could mean reducing 3 week background checks to 2 days, ensuring onsite meetings happen 48 hours after initial screening, or streamlining your interview scheduling process to reduce the downtime that allows your best candidates to accept other competing offers.
Summary
If you can understand where your team is today, where you want it to go, why you want to go there, and the fears you’ll face have along the way – you’ll do wonders to improve the talent shortages so few have managed to get ahead of.
And remember – starting is always preferable to stalling.
Find whatever process you have in place and build on it, momentum will find you along the way.
Give a few of these points a try, and we’ll have a lot more to cover in our next edition!
Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
1. Manufacturing Talent Mastery Newsletters: Join a network of over 1,000 industrial leaders and learn how to dominate every phase of the engagement cycle with our weekly tips & tactics.
2. Talent Assessment: If you have a maintenance team that’s short on talent – or just not running as well as it could, our FREE Competitive Market Analysis uncovers the precise market positioning required to attract and retain experienced talent.
3. 5 Pillars: If you’re eager to further explore how winning teams are attacking the talent market, I invite you to explore our in-depth research on “The 5-Stage Industrial Talent Attraction Formula.” Download our FREE guide and discover the exact blueprint for building a High-Performing team… the right way.
