Taking a lean thinking approach can help solve staffing shortages.
A Lean Thinking Approach
Staffing shortages continue to be a popular topic. Manufacturers are struggling to attract and retain the talent they need to run their operations to satisfy customer demands. Countless manufacturers have reacted by forcing excessive overtime on the existing workforce, staffing front-line operations with leadership team members (and thus foregoing other business priorities), or even scaling back operations and limiting output. However, none of these quick fixes are solid strategies supporting the long-term health of the organization and its members.
Traditional approaches to solve for staffing shortages have included practices such as increasing wages and benefits, more aggressive recruiting tactics, and implementing signing and retention bonuses. Fundamentally, these types of techniques are focused on spending money to compete for “people capacity” against the external market and come with significant short- and long-term negative financial implications.
We believe there are alternative approaches to consider prior to pursing these traditional approaches. Other approaches to close staffing gaps from within are retaining employees, more effectively utilizing current employees, and applying lean principles to the talent acquisition process. These solutions can be much more effective for solving the staffing gap conundrum.
Stop Leakage
Eliminating or reducing employee turnover is one of the best ways to mitigate staffing challenges. Every employee retained in an organization is one less new individual that must go through the lengthy and expensive cycle of recruiting, on-boarding, and training. Study after study has proven that engaged employees are more productive and much less likely to exit their organizations.
When properly executed, lean manufacturing transformations engage all team members by empowering their process improvement and problem-solving capabilities. Fully engaging the hearts and heads, as well as hands, of team members through lean transformation is proven method to improve employee satisfaction and retention.
Recent rule changes have allowed college football players to transfer to different schools without penalty or loss of eligibility. Progressive coaches have realized they must constantly e re-recruit players to retain the talent they already recruited and developed into key contributors.
A similar free-market system exists in manufacturing. We know that employee satisfaction, and thus retention, is directly correlated to the degree to which employees feel valued and connected with the organization and its purpose. Manufacturing leadership must continuously re-recruit existing team members by connecting with employees and providing a safe and supportive work environment.
Make sure that you’re working harder to build a participative environment in which employees are truly engaged and valued than you are fighting in the open market to attract new, unproven individuals. Avoid the challenges of new employee acquisition by retaining the great talent you already have!
Fill staffing shortages gaps from within
Lean thinking often approaches challenges from different angles. For example, instead of thinking “we don’t have enough space for all this material,” a lean perspective concludes “we have too much inventory and not enough flow.” Carrying similar lean logic to apparent staffing shortages, a lean thinker starts with the premise that “we have our people engaged in too many wasteful activities” instead of “we need more people.”
While lean is often misconstrued as solely focused on cost reduction, the true essence of lean is to focus on waste elimination. Once waste and non-value-added activities are identified and removed from a team’s work, that precious human capacity and talent can be redeployed to fill open positions that would have otherwise required additional, new employees.
Freeing-up people to contribute via higher value-added work can fill openings and prevent future attrition by increasing the employee’s satisfaction and engagement, resulting in increased retention and avoiding the need to fill positions from external sources.
Drive the waste out of the Talent Acquisition Process
If you must go outside to recruit additional staffing, apply lean thinking to the process. Flip the script to think of the candidate as the “customer.” What in the hiring process is Value Added to them? Of course, it is getting hired.
Reduce lead time in your hiring process to get the candidates you want.
Focus on reducing lead time in your hiring processes to deliver value to candidates as quickly as possible. The wastes of motion, inventory, defects, overproduction, over-processing and especially, waiting, lurk in most every corner of a talent acquisition process.
Applying lean principles can enable you to provide a decision to the candidate in minutes instead of the typical days or weeks. In today’s market, if you don’t evaluate and select quality candidates quickly, your competitors will.
Summary
Staffing shortages in today’s industrial environment are real and will not end anytime soon. While activities focused on improved employee retention and eliminating waste to free-up people are not necessarily the best and only solutions to the staffing challenge, they are well within a company’s control and can go a long way to closing the gap.
