The war for talent: How to protect your company from the talent gap and the great resignation?

The great resignation in manufacturing

The great resignation is shaking up the job market everywhere. Millions of workers around the world are quitting their jobs in hopes of finding something better and worthwhile. The trend began at the beginning of 2021 in the United States of America and the country has been hitting record resignation rates since. The movement has been spreading globally and has shown no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

The great resignation was largely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, making people to rethink the role of work in their lives. Uninspiring jobs, dissatisfaction with the working conditions, and low salaries are no longer tolerated. This has in combination with the higher cost of living due to high inflation rates, driven workers to find better deals from companies that are short on staff.

Resignation Rate in the United States of America, reaching record numbers beginning in March 2021.

The manufacturing industry is getting hit hard by the great resignation. With job seekers having the power to make demands, companies have had to reinvent the way they recruit workers and come up with new ways to close the talent gap. Manufacturers are struggling to find and keep good employees. Let’s take a look at some quick wins that help companies win the war for talent.

Protecting your company from the talent gap and the great resignation

The obvious Human Resources management

The first thing you can do as a company to attract and to retain employees, is to make some seemingly obvious improvements on HR. Make sure people enjoy their jobs, notice small changes in their behavior and intervene before your most passionate workers lose interest. Respect the work-life balance and give your employees enough perspective for the future. And lastly, show your appreciation for their work: benchmark their salaries and make increases if necessary, especially in times of unseen inflation rates.

The less obvious Human Resources management

Some HR measures are less obvious but are equally as important for finding and keeping workers. A smooth onboarding and offboarding process, for example. Make sure your company is prepared for employee turnover in the next couple of years. Most companies rely on a risk analysis of what would happen if the most skilled people were to resign, and how to best prepare their business for these instances. Make a similar analysis to gain insight in the reliance of your company on your employees.

Managing the talent gap by transferring skills

The talent gap refers to a lack of skilled personnel in an organization. Inherently, all companies are dealing with a skills gap since there would otherwise never be a need to hire. However, if an organization is struggling to close the talent gap on the long term, it might start disrupting the future business performance.

Prepare your company for the talent gap: make sure the knowledge of your personnel is documented and kept safely in order to transfer skills. Documentation platforms are popular tools for this, but there are also visual resources such as Augmented Reality, product configurators, interactive product manuals, and online courses that help you capture your employees’ valuable knowledge, while allowing you to transfer these talents to new workers or even to customers.

Avoid uninspiring jobs, automate whatever you can

Having your skilled people not utilizing their talents can be incredibly wasteful. It’s therefore a good idea to ask yourself every now and then what your most skilled employees are doing on a daily basis, and which of their tasks can be automated. Automating repetitive work protects your company from the talent gap and from the great resignation:

• Choosing for automation implies choosing for a digital solution, which makes it easy to transfer documented skills and knowledge to new employees.
• Your company becomes less dependent on a few highly skilled people and are not serving as a bottleneck anymore.
• Automating repetitive work frees up time that employees can spend on more worthwhile tasks and projects, creating a more inspiring job.

This is why we have created Hive CPQ. We believe your teams and customers should be able to focus on things that really matter, so our solution is made to automate any time-consuming and repetitive tasks. The product configurator also trains and guides new customers and newly hired employees when it comes to difficult product related questions. Your company could be saving out on some full-time employees by using Hive CPQ.

Conclusion

The talent gap and the great resignation are forming a real challenge for manufacturing businesses worldwide. Finding and keeping skilled employees is harder than ever. This situation has forced companies to reinvent the way they recruit and care for employees. We summed up some of the quick wins to win the war for talent. Make sure people enjoy their jobs and benchmark their salaries. Offer a smooth onboarding and offboarding process and document knowledge in order to transfer skills to new employees and to customers. And lastly, to avoid uninspiring jobs: try to automate repetitive tasks as much as possible. That is how you find and keep skilled workers.