The manufacturing industry gets challenged with new ordeals every financial year as technology, markets, and client demands shift. Understanding the organization better to successfully run operations needs more than a vigilant and experienced team. This is where the role of the Human Resources department comes into the picture, gaining more and more importance as time passes.
As industries restart in late 2020, the role of the HR department has become very important. HR stands a chance to contribute towards business by addressing issues like under-productivity, safety hazards, increase in employee turnover, and disguised unemployment.
HRs now have the responsibility to tackle business-impacting challenges such as hiring well-trained and qualified workers, maintaining ideal productivity, increasing skill gaps along delegating employee shifts in current times. Here are a few areas to focus on:
1. Hiring Right People For The Right Jobs
The most important part of HR in your manufacturing business is a recruitment and finding the right people for the job. However, finding talent in the manufacturing industry can be difficult, due to high attrition at the entry levels, maintaining employment consistency, and skills with a blue-collared workforce.
According to a Deloitte study, the skills gap may leave 2.4 million manufacturing positions unfilled between 2018 and 2028.
It is becoming increasingly vital for the HR team to enforce high-quality recruitment processes in order to attract the right talent at the right time. With the help of HR tech recruitment applications, the department can ensure that their recruitment parameters and procedures are seamless to hire the best talent in the industry.
Recommended Reading: Comprehensive Buyer’s guide to Recruitment Tech Manufacturing Industry Edition
2. Elevating Employee Experience
Employees who are engaged at work are more likely to be productive consistently – which leads to more revenue. The Workplace Research Foundation found that employees who are engaged are 38% more likely to have above-average productivity.
HR departments in manufacturing organizations are shifting focus to enable superior employee experience with HR-tech platforms enabling organization-wide collaboration, instant employee query resolution with AI-Driven HR-Helpdesk. When the lockdown hit, mobile-first HR technology became a rescuer – most employees (blue & while collared employees) were able to access their information, stay connected with their organizations, & collaborate on their tasks. This approach not only ensures a seamless employee experience but also reduces bottlenecks in smooth operations.
3. Employee Learning and Growth
Employee Learning and Development has always been an important HR function. But this became crucial with a labor crunch in the preceding year.
“An average organization loses anywhere between 1% and 2.5% of their total revenue on the time it takes to bring a new hire up to speed.”
HR departments must have personalized growth plans for employees so that everyone gets the right growth opportunities. A comprehensive learning and development system can transform employee learning paths with unlimited training custom recommendations to motivate and improve overall employee productivity.
4. Building the Talent bench strength
For large manufacturing companies, ensuring employees are aligned with the changing priorities of the business is vital. Employee performance has become a top business priority. In this rapid cycle economy, HR departments know that having a high-performing workforce is essential for growth and survival. HR leaders in manufacturing must build skill clouds for mapping roles & skills, offer the right training, and continuous feedback for effective talent management.
This will enable organizations to track individual employee performance, continuous performance conversations, instant feedback, and review on the go.
New-age performance management New-Age performance management tools help organizations across industries to assess performance, view, compare and share ratings and configure the goal management workflow – MBO, OKRs, BSCs – all on a single dashboard.
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5. Build a Culture that translates beyond physical workspaces
Every organization has its essence, which gives birth to unique work culture. The HR department must present a workplace culture that reflects organizational values. Creating a culture not only includes safety at the workplace, work ethic, team spirit, collaboration, and healthy competition but also, involves helping employees achieve their professional, personal, holistic, and social needs, too.
Since operations have shifted, it is vital to have a collaborative and outcome-oriented approach towards the work. Setting up daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goal-setting sessions will help the employees to re-visit the vacuums in the overall functioning that may be causing unforeseen delays and setbacks.
HR departments in the manufacturing industry need to lay an action-plan with the right toolkit to ensure process improvement and streamlined operations.
Conclusion
After major setbacks to the manufacturing industry in recent times, HR departments have the required capability to enable a truly fundamental shift in how manufacturing organizations can maximize returns on human capital investment. The return on investment in this new approach will depend substantially on an understanding of and a focus on the human and technical foundations of opportunity marketplaces: workforce behaviors and expectations, management incentives, data and analytics, machine learning, and platforms.
