TAKE ACTION, any action is better than no action, even if it is wrong, as long as we learn from it. Anyone I have worked with in the last 25+ years of my career has heard me say this.
I saw a recent statistic that there are over 400,000 open jobs in the US that employers are struggling to find and retain candidates for. What if I told you I could show you how to reduce the demand for hiring people you struggle to find? I hear this from many of SPL’s clients, along with “We can’t find and retain new employees.” There are two central themes with this challenge. Employers need more employees because they need more capacity, and they need to develop strong training protocols.
Let’s unveil a solution to capacity. Often, as in the core topic of this article, employers address capacity constraints through additional equipment and hiring employees. Lean can create capacity and reduce the demand for employees!
Last week, SPL generated conservatively 880 hours of capacity for a client through Lean Processes. Another client had a new press on order and was facing the daunting task of finding and training three operators to run it. Through a setup reduction event, we created 5,200 hours of capacity in a single week! They ended up canceling the P.O. for the press and didn’t have to hire three people! Lean Enterprise is not a magic wand. It takes work, consistent follow up and leadership. But when led properly, it can make a significant impact on the challenge of hiring in today’s climate.
The second theme pulled from this statistic was the barrier of not having effective training practices. Often, significant effort is put into hiring the person, and then we assume they will be trained on the job. Earlier in my career, I joined a company that was a turnaround and we were experiencing 50% annual turnover. On my first day, one of the department managers came to me with a requisition to sign approving 4 new hires. I asked him about our training protocol and who the trainers were. We didn’t have a documented process and the manager was the trainer for that department. I asked him how many people he realistically thought he could train at one time. We agreed that training four at once was not realistic and I approved two. I also gave him the responsibility to document everything he trained them in as he trained them. This became the first step in developing a robust training protocol. We formalized the training process over the next couple of months and our turnover dropped from 50% to under 15% in six months!
These examples highlight two approaches to address hiring challenges facing many of us today. The first sentence in this article about taking action sums it up. If you don’t take action and do something different, how can you expect to change the outcome?
If this resonates with your company’s challenges, Take Action and reach out to schedule a conversation on how we can apply Lean and improved training protocols to move the needle in your business.
- You’ve got to have a place people want to work – or you only get those that maybe can’t work elsewhere
- You have to have a robust hiring and onboarding process
- You have to have work/ task standards to train the workforce – it must be repeatable, easy to understand, and progress
- You have to have servant leaders willing to invest in people, train them – and desire to see them succeed
Do you have a mission and values that people can rally behind – something greater than making more $$$ (we still need to make $$$). Build community
Brian Van de Water
CEO
SPL Consulting, LLC.
brian@splconsultingllc.com
