Are you short on labor resources, or are you actually just coming up short on proper allocation?
No matter the industry, many ops leaders often face the challenge of retaining their top performers. When it comes down to it, most full-timers don’t want to stay in a position where they have to balance specialized work with tasks below their pay grade.
Sound confusing? Let’s break it down.
Let’s say you have a welder, or maybe even a whole team of welders. Besides tasks having to do with welding, they’re also responsible for loading and unloading, examining materials for defects, assembling, running machines, and the general maintenance of the moving parts they operate day by day.
Now let’s say that you’re noticing welding tasks are being handled slowly, inefficiently, or just with poor quality in general. You may be scratching your head, saying to yourself “Everyone on my team is a welder, why is it that the welding tasks are the ones being done so poorly?”
Anyone in manufacturing knows that welding is a specialized skill, and to even earn the title of “welder” you have to be able to prove yourself. So, is this problem really about welders?
Let’s take a look at what’s getting in the way:
Streamlining your team’s processes is the key to making sure everyone– and every skillset– is appropriately placed. It’s not that you don’t have enough welders, it’s that your A-Team is too busy with B-Team tasks.
Most people don’t like working for companies where they are bogged down by tasks that don’t allow them to do what they were trained for. This could cause your best full-time team to seek similar work with fewer responsibilities attached.
Don’t worry just yet, you have some options to retain your A-Team. First off, the work ranging from loading to welding still has to get done one way or another. Each part of your shop floor should have a team dedicated to a task, instead of everyone doing every task on their own. This creates the opportunity for your project to be correctly managed from start to end.
You could either cycle workers in shifts, meaning one day they’re welding, the next they’re operating machines, and so on. What are the pros and cons? Initially, this might run smoothly. This method could allow your team members to excel in various skillsets while allowing you to see the strengths and weaknesses of each operator. After a while, you may notice that managerial biases have started to show themselves, and you’ve unintentionally created teams over time, seemingly forgetting that everyone was skilled in welding. Where your shift schedule originally began as a fair playing field, it’s now become segmented leaving the full skillsets of your team unrealized.
After a while, you may notice retention slipping as your team members are regularly kept from being placed where they are happiest. Instead of watering down their skillsets, there is still an option to buoy them up with additional support.
Whether you’ve used on-demand labor before, or this is the first time you’ve heard about it, it will always be a solution so you can utilize your A Team as effectively as possible. Here’s how:
When you use on-demand labor, you can use your team for what you hired them for, while employing the skills of other workers at a lower pay grade. These workers are there when you need them, and gone when you don’t. This allows you to have all welders on deck when demand is high, without compromising the ability to get other tasks done.
Over time, on-demand workers within your Labor Pool can become familiar with your workspace, allowing them to be a part of your team without having to pay out full-time benefits. Having a Labor Pool reduces turnover, enables scalability, and improves both productivity and work culture.
Don’t lose your best players just because the operations they’re part of are being run inefficiently– instead, optimize your operations with on-demand labor so your A-Team will always be your A-Team.
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