Overcoming Skilled Labor Shortage

Wade Anderson:

Hey, manufacturing world. Welcome to another episode of Shop Matters sponsored by Okuma America. I'm your host for today's episode, Wade Anderson. Joining me today, I've got Craig Lamb. Craig, welcome.

Craig Lamb:

Thanks. Great to be here.

Wade Anderson:

Give us a little background of yourself, what you do, and where your area of expertise lies.

Craig Lamb:

Well, I'm Craig Lamb. I'm Vice President of Corporate and Continuing Education at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College. My connection with Okuma is the fact that we are the host of the Okuma Machine Tool Academy, which is the professional development arm of Okuma to help technicians learn how to maintain and produce value out of Okuma machines. The rest of my job is to oversee industrial education across lots of different platforms for manufacturers in our area. That includes specifically for today's topic, recruitment, screening, selection, and onboarding of employees, but it also includes upgrade training, apprenticeships, technical training, those kinds of things. We're deeply involved in the world of talent and brainpower and making sure that employers can compete and win in the global economy.

Wade Anderson:

Craig, one, it's great to have you here. I appreciate you coming. This is a topic that I've been excited to really talk about because it doesn't matter where you are, at least in the United States, and I'm sure Canada and other areas have the same problem. Everybody has that common issue of how do we find good talent? How do we hire good employees? And then not only how do we hire them, but how do we keep them? The ones that we have, how do we retain them?

Craig Lamb:

Right.

Wade Anderson:

I think this is going to be a great discussion today. From that, I guess let's kick off with recruitment. What are some best practices either that you've seen or best practices that you like to help educate people on, on recruitment processes?

Craig Lamb:

Well, I think there are some myths about recruitment, and I think that we're in a period where change in the economy, change in the available workforce, change in attitudes are really changing the way that employers have to recruit. I always like to start out by saying that really recruitment is a verb and it requires activity. It's an active thing. One of the myths I think that exists is the idea that I can get the people that I need simply through software and web applications. Not that I'm discouraging the use of Indeed and LinkedIn and all these programs, but they're fairly passive. You put your listing out there and you wait for things to happen. I think-

Wade Anderson:

You hang your sign out, say, okay, everybody come to me.

Craig Lamb:

Help wanted. Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Craig Lamb:

You and the other 50 million employers that have the same sign out.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

Yeah. So how do you distinguish yourself, and how do you find that right person? In a market like this, when most of the people who can be working are working, I think it's important for employers to recognize the fact that the person that they're looking for already has a job, we know that. The person that they're looking for may not be looking for a job. So they may not trip over for that sign because they don't visit those websites. It's important for them to be able to reach out to people and actively recruit, find candidates and know what their candidate looks like. Are they looking to hire someone with a certain set of credentials, or are they looking for people with potential, and where do they find those? It's important to approach recruitment as an active activity.

Craig Lamb:

The other thing that I encourage employers to do in the world of recruitment in this competitive environment is to engage the marketing department. Market your workplace as hard as you market your products.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

HR people are great folks, but they're not necessarily marketers. They may not know how to package that, how to approach people and how to put a campaign together, to reach out to potential candidates and let them know about what a great place to work your place is.

Wade Anderson:

Right. I spent a lot of my time, probably 95% of my workload, I spend talking to customers about their processes and how they do things and what they did in the past, how they machined parts 20 years ago, we have a better way of doing it. What you did in the past, we can do better today and trying to get them comfortable with that change.

Craig Lamb:

Right.

Wade Anderson:

Really what you're talking about is essentially the same thing on when you're recruiting the way that you used to do it, there's a better way of doing it. And you have to adapt and adjust to be able to attract the talent that you're looking for.

Craig Lamb:

For sure. Yeah. The word of the decade is pivot. I think it's important that-

Wade Anderson:

If I hear pivot one more time. Yeah.

Craig Lamb:

Yeah. Well, you just heard it. I'm sorry about that. But it really will require a pivot and some innovation around how you apply the resources that are inside your organization to solve the talent problem.

Wade Anderson:

The marketing component, I think that's an interesting piece. We're going through a web design update and virtually everybody's website on the very bottom of the page, there's the little careers piece, but then there are companies that I see actively between YouTube and Instagram and other things where they've really spun up some really cool, I guess you'd call it recruitment videos, but things that are attractive that catches your attention. All of a sudden, you spend 30 seconds watching this exciting reel about what this company does and what they're about.

Craig Lamb:

Right. It tells stories about what people actually do there. Websites for manufacturers are focused on about talking about the product.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

You can still talk about the product at the same time you're talking about the people that make it, and the pride they put into it, and the passion that goes into the manufacturer of high-quality products. Telling the story about people at the same time you tell the story about products is a good way to begin to establish company culture and to start to let people know what it's like to work there.

Wade Anderson:

You just hit a word that I'm very passionate about, and that's culture.

Craig Lamb:

Right.

Wade Anderson:

I think that's something, you look at Okuma and the longevity that we've got, not that we don't have people resign every once in a while, things of that nature, but for the overwhelming majority, we've got people with a long history of tenure.

Craig Lamb:

Right.

Wade Anderson:

That has to do with the culture and the environment of our workspace. What do you see? How do people, one, utilize their culture as a recruitment tool, but two, if they don't have the culture that is conducive to attract people, how do they adjust and create that culture?

Craig Lamb:

Yeah. It's difficult to explain what a good culture looks like, except we know a little bit more about what it feels like. The example that I use is I say I think every community has what I would call a premier employer. The premier employer is the one that the workforce would give up a major organ to work there. They're the ones that, when they have a job opening, they open the door and whisper that they're hiring, and there's 400 people standing at the door. People know what that culture is, and they understand it, and live it. The interesting thing is that when every company starts, it has that premier culture. It's awarded by the community by default. When a new company comes to town, everybody wants to work there, they want to be out on the ground floor.

Wade Anderson:

It's exciting. It's new.

Craig Lamb:

Yeah. It's got all that stuff going for it. Some companies manage to squander it, and some companies manage to preserve it. The question about how you get it back, how you get your mojo back once you lose it, is a big challenge, and it's a long-term process, but there are some deliberate things people can do to build that culture. Part of it is to tell the story within the existing employees. I consulted with a company once that was a very successful company, but the employees really had no idea what they were making. They knew the part number, they knew the process for making it. They had no idea where that piece went.

Wade Anderson:

They just knew the process of what they're doing for widget X.

Craig Lamb:

Yeah. It's a 132B, we're making 132Bs today, whatever those are.

Wade Anderson:

When the kid at the ball game says, "Hey, what does your dad do?" Well, he makes 132B.

Craig Lamb:

Yeah. What are they? I have no idea. And then ask dad, "What do you do?" "I don't know where that goes." So, they worked hard to make sure that they instilled in the employees the idea of what that company does, not just what it makes. In other words, those parts were going into the safety systems in Mercedes-Benz cars. They were no longer making, cutting, and chamfering tubing at this place, they were saving lives. They were making components that go into world-class vehicles. Once they understood where they were in the big picture, it started to make more sense to them. Those folks felt more of a connection. They could see a Mercedes drive down the road and say, "I did that."

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

Building that culture is making sure that people really and truly understand what you're doing and what you're accomplishing, what those larger outcomes are than just let's make a tub full of these parts and then change over and make something else.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Craig Lamb:

Another piece I think that people can do that I advise companies to do, and that they often are not doing, is include their supervisors in the selection of employees. During the recruitment screening selection, onboarding process, it's important that... I would say that probably seven out of 10 companies that I work with, the HR department selects the newest employee, brings him down to the supervisor and says, "Here you go. Here's your new worker."

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. Congratulations.

Craig Lamb:

Yeah. When people talk about the notion of fit, person-job fit, who knows that best? The supervisors. Train those supervisors in the behaviorally anchored interviewing techniques and start technique that you need to be able to do that properly, but have them engaged in the process. And then the questions that candidates begin to ask are being answered by their future supervisor, not by someone who they'll never work with. There are things like that where the culture is beginning to be established, and there's ownership in the culture, and there are pieces that work together to establish what you do. The rest of culture often is just working within the community to establish the importance of the company and the premiership, as we used that term before, the premiership of the company.

Craig Lamb:

Investing time and resources in working with schools and taking folks on tours, and letting them get inside and know what you do. I wrote a paper once for a group of our employers to teach them how to take middle schoolers on tours. Because when folks go on tours, we as manufacturers often want to take people through what I call the input process output tour. Right?

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

This stuff comes into loading dock. We do these processes on it, and look at this, this is what comes out the other end. What people really want to learn when they start to learn about your culture is, what kinds of decisions am I making, are the people on the floor making? Who are they working with? What data are they using? How are they improving, how are they working to improve things? They want to know about people. It's important to begin to understand how promoting the idea that people are an important element of the business's success and promoting that to the community so that people understand that they're valued there.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

Those are the ones that people will show up for when the door gets open and people whisper.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. There's a little bit of a tie in, I feel like what you're talking about, there's a book by Simon Sinek. Everything Begins with Why, I believe, is the name of the book, but he talks about how people don't buy what you make, they buy why you make it. There's a little bit of that component with what you're talking about as far as trying to attract people. They're not just attracted by what you make, but why you're doing it and why that role is important for whatever position it is that they're looking for.

Craig Lamb:

Yeah. We had another employer once that was having difficulty recruiting employees. They were a machining firm that made very large gears. They had hobbing processes and machining processes around gear manufacturing. These were 40-inch diameter gears. It was not that interesting to folks to work there until they learned that those were going in the nacelles of wind turbines. When young people knew that these were really green jobs, these were really part of the new energy economy, and they could go to work there and be part of something more important. Sometimes it's what your customers do with the things that you make that are as important as what you actually do.

Wade Anderson:

Right. Yeah. What that process looks like further down this stream.

Craig Lamb:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. What about credentials? Hiring for credentials versus hiring for character or passion.

Craig Lamb:

Right.

Wade Anderson:

What's your thoughts on that?

Craig Lamb:

Well, I guess there are some jobs where the credentials are so critical that you have to hire credentials. But when you hire character first, that's how you begin to build culture.

Wade Anderson:

Explain that deeper to me.

Craig Lamb:

All right. If you hire a person because they share your vision for what quality looks like, they share your understanding of how customers are important. You can't teach this stuff, by the way.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

That they understand the values of teamwork and communication. Then you teach them to be a CNC machinist, or you improve their CNC machining skills. It doesn't mean that they're complete novices or that they worked at the snow cones store yesterday, and today they're going to be running a mill.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

That the idea is to look deeper into the person and make sure that they're a fit. If you're trying to build culture, every person that you put in there that doesn't fit the culture lets you take a step backwards. It's important to make sure that those folks are going to be good fits. The other thing that I'd say is that good interviews are usually when you're embracing that notion of character over credentials. Good interviews are focused mostly on those behavioral aspects, that you're understanding what people would do in different scenarios, how they work, not what they do. There are assessments that will help you determine what skill level they have. An interview's usually a pretty lousy place to figure that out.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

An example might be that if I were interviewing you for, well, we'll turn it around. If you're interviewing me for a job where using Excel is very important. Okay. You ask me, "Can you do Excel?" I go, "Yeah." Are you very good at it? "Oh, I'm real good."

Wade Anderson:

"I'm excellent."

Craig Lamb:

Yeah. Adjectives, so I'm real good. My operational definition of real good is that I can get a column to add up and I can change the color of the column, and you want me to do pivot tables. Right.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

Then if you do ask me if I can do pivot tables, I'm in an interview for a job, what am I going to say?

Wade Anderson:

Absolutely.

Craig Lamb:

Oh yeah. We have to point out that we did just use the word pivot again.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Craig Lamb:

But there are assessments to determine that. It's better to validate those skills through easy to administer assessments that can demonstrate that people have those skills. The interview is the place to identify whether the person's a good fit, and that fit is so important, and that fit is what really determines retention. The idea of satisfaction of the employer with the hire and satisfaction of the hire with the employer comes from making sure that fit's there. Hiring for that character piece is there. Character's a word we use, we're not talking about only hiring Boy Scouts that are trustworthy, loyal, helpful, and friendly. It's making sure that their personality, that their goals, that their work style, and that their behaviors fit into the way that the company does work.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. One of our distributor principles a long time ago, he always used the term "fire in the gut." He looked for people that had fire in the gut, had that passion, and then to your point, you can teach skills. There's a lot of creative things that you can do to teach people to run machines, sell machines, build machines, whatever the case is. But teaching somebody to have that passion to want to get up and outwork the next 10 people around them, I've never found anybody that knows how to teach that part of it.

Craig Lamb:

Right. Exactly.

Wade Anderson:

From the interview process itself, are there best practices that you see? One I'll share that I was not a fan of when it first rolled out when we were using it at Okuma. Basically, if you were to come back or be reincarnated as an animal, what would it be? Now, the first time I heard that, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that sounds like a HR 101 thing." But then we all had to do it as a management group at a staff meeting one time. But then during an interview, we're interviewing a candidate. He was checking all the boxes, everything was going great. We all felt good about him. The last question, our HR director threw that question out there.

Wade Anderson:

He sat there for a long awkward pause. Sometimes you got to let silence work. So we sat there, and we were just quiet, and we waited on him. Finally, he goes, "A cat." Okay, that's interesting. That could go a couple different ways. "Why a cat?" "They can sit around the house, be fat and lazy, they get fed everything..." Whoa, okay. All of a sudden, my brain went, "Okay, this is not the right guy," because I'm thinking back to the fire in the gut side of it, you want to be a fat, lazy house cat. All of a sudden, I thought, "Well, you know what? That question actually did show me a different side of this individual that I wouldn't have seen otherwise." Are there things like that? What do you see from an interview process that people should do more of?

Craig Lamb:

Well, I think a lot of them. There are really a couple of different approaches, and you see a lot of them where people say, "Tell me about a time when..." They're asked to reflect on a time when they did something, when they had a project or a responsibility, what was the problem? What was the action? What was the result? Those are important because the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. The alternate strategy is to have people fantasize about what thought might be. "Let's pretend that you have a situation where your boss came to you..." Well, those are easier for people to give the answer that is politically correct, or that is the right answer.

Wade Anderson:

That you know they're looking for.

Craig Lamb:

Instead of their answer. Asking them to tell about instances where they were able to employ the skills that you find important. If you wanted them to be innovative problem-solvers, "tell us about a time when you solved a problem, that the approach you came up with was highly innovative. Tell me not only about the approach itself, but tell me about the problem that you faced, the resources that you used, the process that you went through to solve the problem and the impact that it had, the outcomes that it had." If they can do that, then that'll give you a picture of how they would approach work in your place.

Wade Anderson:

Okay. How about retainment? We talk a lot about recruiting people, but what about keeping the people that you've got? What are you seeing in the industry currently? What are some maybe innovative things that people are doing to retain the talent that they've got?

Craig Lamb:

Well, there's nothing worse than trying to fill up a leaky bucket, right? You need to put as much effort on the other side as you can. I think we're seeing a lot of good practices around the idea of understanding people's situation outside work. I guess the word that I use is compassion, but it's hard to have employers think about being compassionate. Because they're like, "This is not my job. I'm a business. I'm here to do things." But here's a few examples. I was at a customer site a couple of months ago and the HR manager said, "People just don't want to work." I said, "Hmm, tell me about that." She said, "Well, we have openings on second shift, and everybody has to start on second shift." I guess it's more of a recruitment question, but I'm going to give it to you anyway.

Wade Anderson:

Okay. That's fine.

Craig Lamb:

But it relates to retention. She said, "Everybody has to start on second shift. We just can't get people to apply." I said, "Well, so you don't want to hire single mothers." She said, "Well, of course we do." I said, "Well, I don't think you do." Because there's no real second shift childcare slots available. Lot of mothers rely on school to be that daycare program.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

They can neither afford it nor is it accessible to have them do that. That was a compassion touch point to have them recognize that everybody is not available 24/7 to do whatever the employer needs him to be able to do.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

Another kind of compassion... These are ways of me trying to give dimension to the idea of compassion, rather than just feeling sorry for people.

Wade Anderson:

Sure.

Craig Lamb:

I had a customer once who had a very large Hispanic workforce, and they would have a plant shutdown over Christmas. That plant shutdown was two weeks in length. They were talking to me after in January, and they said, "Well, we're going to have to fire all these people." This was a plant of about 3,600 people, probably.

Wade Anderson:

Oh, wow.

Craig Lamb:

They said, "We're going to have to fire these 120 people because they didn't come back in time." They said, "We really hate to do this because they're great workers. They're just wonderful people, and we love them, but we have to let them go." I said, "What law is it that says you have to let them go." They said, "Well, it's our policy." I said, "Well, let's look at your policy. What does your policy say?" "Well, it says you get so many absences and you're out, and they were out more than three days." After talking to those same employees learned that the expense of going back to Mexico, which is what they did on Christmas, then they would stay until a certain other holiday before they came back.

Wade Anderson:

Okay.

Craig Lamb:

We said, "How about you change the policy so that they return within three days of that next holiday. Then if they don't, then you've got to do discipline issue." But now we're being compassionate about the idea of what people need. Retention sometimes can be around just the idea of understanding where employees are really coming from. There's also what I'll call initial turnover that happens. Initial turnover is that turnover that happens in the first 90 days when somebody just says, "This isn't for me, I'm out, I'm out, I'm out." Right?

Wade Anderson:

Right. You think it's one thing, you show up and realize, "whoa, this is not what I thought it was, and I'm not cut out for it."

Craig Lamb:

I've had employers say, "Boy, people I thought were going to be great. They just don't want to work." I'm like, "Hey, let's see because if they didn't want to work, they probably wouldn't have applied. So let's get to the root cause of this. Let's see what we can figure out." What we learned was that in a lot of cases, when a person, especially a person who was unemployed, gets a job, we think, "Great. They're alright now." Except the cash flow situation that they face is changing. All of a sudden, my daycare provider needs to be paid every week, but I may not get my first paycheck for five weeks. My transportation costs went up, but I may not get my first paycheck for five weeks. We found a large number of employees who just stopped coming to work. They basically ghosted their employer because they were unable to manage the cash flow piece of it. Their daycare provider said, "Take your kid back. Can't take him if you don't pay." They said, "Well, I won't get paid for two more weeks. Sorry."

Craig Lamb:

Understanding what those business arrangements that workers have can really cut down on that initial turnover, when you really found a good person and you really found a good fit, it's just that the money didn't work out. How do you get money in people's hands faster? How do you make sure that they don't face some barrier that's going to make them want to stop working? The other piece is culture doesn't have to be ping pong tables and cotton candy bars. It's not Google, you don't have to do that all the time. But culture is about understanding what's important to employees. One of the things that we've found that can be detrimental to company culture is the headcount method for staffing. I'm not an expert at this, so I'm just going to give you the high level view of it. But the headcount method is a method for optimizing HR portions of processes so that you have the right people there at the right time to cover the takt time that's necessary to do the task. It's very task-oriented, very process-oriented.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Craig Lamb:

But it doesn't always leave room for things like orientation of new employees. It doesn't leave room for things like employee training. It doesn't leave room for anything else. It says, "You don't have the headcount. Our formula says you can run this shift with 12 people."

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

But if all you ever did was run the process, then yes.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

But the headcount method probably needs some tweaking at plants to be able to be culturally sensitive, to be able to know what that real staffing level looks like. So, first, use a headcount method to identify how to optimize the labor side of a process, but also understand all the other things you need to do to increase the productivity workers, to keep them technologically up to date, to keep them safe, to onboard them properly. Really, the other piece I'll just expand on culture is onboarding.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

Our studies show that the average onboarding time for an employee on first day of work before they need to be making parts on the floor is nine hours.

Wade Anderson:

Okay.

Craig Lamb:

And that's not much.

Wade Anderson:

Right. Yeah. I was expecting a much bigger window there.

Craig Lamb:

Well, and when you think about the fact that a lot of that was required safety training and things like that, that they really don't learn much about the company.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Craig Lamb:

They have to find their way on their own once they're on the floor. That's a difficult journey, and if people aren't assertive enough, then they may get swallowed up and maybe never really understand the big picture of what the company does, how to communicate with other departments for about material, and quality issues, and safety issues. How do they become part of a safety movement? How do they become part of a total predictive maintenance program? How do they become part of an organization? As opposed to stand there, push that button, do this job.

Wade Anderson:

Right. They get a sense of value.

Craig Lamb:

Right. And they get a sense that they are valued.

Wade Anderson:

Right. All right. Well, Craig, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you joining us.

Craig Lamb:

It's been fun.

Wade Anderson:

Craig, for people to learn more and get in touch with you, if they want to learn more about the Okuma training that you offer, or even the recruitment and pick your brain on how do they do a better job of recruiting and retaining people, how do they reach out and get a hold of you?

Craig Lamb:

Well, if they're interested in learning more about the Okuma Machine Tool Academy, they can visit the Okuma website and they can contact Natalie Rogers at Okuma to learn more about the Okuma Machine Tool Academy and sign up for classes. If they want to reach out to me personally to follow up on some of these items that we've been talking about, they can always reach out to me at craig.lamb@rccc.edu.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent. Thank you all for joining us. If you have thoughts, questions, ideas for future podcasts, please let us know, and be sure to check out all of Okuma's social media sites for additional videos and other content.