Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Your Manufacturing Workforce Turnover

Manufacturers are no strangers to workforce challenges. For years, organizations across the industry have faced a widening skills gap. While retiring tenured experts is the unfortunate reality of an aging workforce, disengaged employees and high turnover in newer hires have exacerbated the skills gap into a full-blown crisis. It’s both an urgent problem and a complicated one, leading business leaders to question if there’s a way to truly solve it, or if this is the new reality that the industry must accept as the status quo.

Top manufacturing workforce turnover challenges

As your seasoned experts retire, their knowledge leaves the workforce, and any wisdom they managed to share before then rests in the hands of newer hires. These “digital natives” expect the company they join to leverage technology, but they often see their role as a stepping stone to the next job rather than the start of a long career in manufacturing. The combination of these challenges can make it seem like you’re stuck in an endless turnover cycle.

A simple answer might be, “invest in your people.” But when your people aren’t committed to staying long term, why would you invest more in your workforce? For organizations struggling in a turnover undertow, a better answer requires smart investments that don’t just empower your current workforce but slows the pace of turnover itself. It also means recognizing that when traditional training and guidance methods fall short, it can hasten your new hires out the door. The good news is that there are innovative market leaders who have adopted new digital solutions to transform their turnover problem into a competitive hiring opportunity, and their example can prove instructive.

Investing wisely in a high-turnover workforce

Considering all the challenges and competing day-to-day priorities that take up valuable time and resources, investing in workforce readiness solutions is a big ask for manufacturing leaders. Mitigating the challenges of a high-turnover workforce is possible—not with aggressive investments, but with wise ones. It takes a multi-prong approach to boost engagement among newer hires and lessen the burden on experienced SMEs:

1. Slow rapid turnover

According to John Carroll, Service Council’s CEO, 40% of field service engineers didn’t feel involved in innovation in their workplace, and 60% didn’t feel that management was considering their feedback to improve their experience.

Keeping employees longer requires engagement. When they feel bored and detached from their work, leaving is a logical next step—especially if they consider their role as “just a job.” The key to slowing rapid turnover is involving your employees in innovative opportunities and engaging them with tools that they won’t get from another job offer. The use of these tools can also be a competitive differentiator for top talent and an enticing perk for digital natives.

2. Prepare workers to be productive faster

Every new hire comes with upfront costs, including the time and resources needed to prepare them to be productive. And the shorter a tenure is, the worse that new-hire ROI model looks. Any successful campaign against turnover costs must address accelerating employees out of the training room and onto the job ASAP. Look for tools that successfully transition new workers into their first shift faster. For workers who don’t stick it out, they’ll have spent more total time being productive. This is where the true cost of training and enablement tools comes into sharp focus. It’s tempting to look at the low production cost of documentation and employee manuals as an easy financial choice for high-turnover roles, but if these traditional tools are contributing to rapid churn, it’s worth considering that cost in your turnover equation.

3. Reduce the pressure on in-house experts

Your in-house experts have years of knowledge under their belts, and it makes sense to leverage that knowledge for training new hires and upskilling existing ones. But if you depend too heavily on SMEs to teach the newer generation of workers, you risk overburdening them, taking time away from their important projects, and pushing them to retire faster. Experts need a way to share their knowledge with the new generation of workers that doesn’t impact their day-to-day jobs. Due to the limited number of experts, they also need a solution to scale that knowledge.

4. Adopt a readiness solution that is easy to manage

Considering an investment in your workforce prompts a big question: Is it worth replacing paper-based materials with a digital solution? This question can feel polarizing and complicated, especially when you consider that today’s manufacturing workforce spans multiple generations, each with their own preferences when it comes to learning about complex products and processes. Language barriers can bring additional challenges in the onboarding and training phases. In addition, the rise in product variance and customized configuration can make it extremely difficult to support all workers—particularly less experienced ones—using paper-based media.

Breaking the turnover cycle requires a readiness solution that meets the varied needs of your workforce and is easy to manage and adopt. Investing in these types of solutions is becoming a competitive differentiator as leading manufacturers adopt new technologies and workforce solutions.

Breaking the turnover cycle to improve business outcomes

Despite serious workforce challenges, best-in-class manufacturing leaders are breaking their turnover cycle by investing in innovative augmented reality (AR) solutions that can:

• Create detailed, in-context work instructions that engage workers and empower them to learn on the job
• Leverage expert knowledge at scale to minimize the burden on your tenured career veterans
• Meet the varied needs of the workforce to drive efficiency

If you can make your environment more desirable to workers of all levels and provide tools that make employees more productive and engaged across their career, you can become a destination employer that is attracting and retaining more (and better) talent. Failing to adopt this strategy puts you at risk of ceding your newer workers to those who are embracing a digital-first vision for their operations.

Of course, implementing new technology takes important considerations. For example, how does AR succeed where traditional approaches fail? How do these AR solutions actually work? Who is using AR, and how do they measure success? Uncover the answers to these questions and more in Augmented Reality as a Digital Mentor: Enabling the Workforce to Close the Skills Gap.