Labour is one of the top expenses in the manufacturing industry, and productivity is the key to optimising it. Manufacturing companies with efficient labour productivity enjoy the healthiest bottom lines. The major portion of the workforce in a manufacturing company consists of blue-collar workers. Improving their efficiency doesn’t only benefit the organization but is in the interest of the national economy as well. Why is it so? Because the global workforce is ever-increasing. In India alone, an estimated 500 million of the workforce consist of blue-collar workers. Empowering them would be equivalent to strengthening our country.
Unfortunately, for a long time, the blue-collar workforce has had little to no access to digital tools for productivity, making it a technologically underserved community, especially in the manufacturing industry. Today, with the increasing adoption of HR technology and internet penetration, many day-to-day business processes are being optimized and automated. This wave of transformation is a great opportunity for the manufacturing industry to make its blue-collar workforce more efficient.
Upskilling is more important than ever
Erstwhile, a vast majority of the work in the manufacturing industry was done manually. It meant that every worker had to be manually skilled in their work. However, with rapid digitisation, most tasks have been automated, with technologies like RPA, IoT, AI, and ML. Robots and machines are performing the tedious and repetetive tasks while the workers are assigned with the responsibility of operating them safely and efficiently.
The world of robotics is ever evolving. This means that the blue-collar workforce has to be trained continuously to operate the latest machinery to ensure smooth, efficient operations. The large size of the blue collor workforce often becomes the primary roadblock in the training process, but HR technology helps you overcome it easily.
With HR tech solutions, companies can leverage intutive Learning Management Systems (LMS) to upskill and reskill their workforce at an individual level, ensuring every employee’s skillsets are updated. Companies unlock the true potential of their upskilling programs when they adopt mobile-friendly LMS. Being accessible through mobile devices ensures that the blue collar workers do not need any additional devices to access their learning modules and they can update their knowledge wherever and whenever they want.
Shift scheduling needs automation
Employees in labour intensive industries often work in shifts. An inefficient shift management can hurt employee experience and ruin productivity. On the other hand, a fair and transparent shift schedule is paramount to employee satisfaction in manufacturing. It goes without saying, a satisfied workforce is a productive workforce.
Managing shifts of a large blue-collar manufacturing workforce is easier said than done. Typically, a scheduling supervisor has to consider hundreds of employees, multiple locations, sites, compliances, attendance, and much more to plan the shifts. In other words, there are a lot of moving parts for a human brain to handle without assistance. HR tech can be leveraged here to manage shifts in a systematic manner, not only for efficient work allocation but also to increase throughput and productivity. AI-enabled smart HR tech products help employers to streamline processes, keep better track of the shifts and avoid absenteeism. The AI capabilities also make it possible for HCM platforms to automate shift scheduling so that the supervisors can focus their attention on more important tasks.
Incorrect Payroll causes attrition
Payroll becomes tedious and error-prone when you have a large number of employees and a sub-par payroll processing platform. Manual payroll calculations done on decades old excel spreadsheets means salaries get delayed, or incorrect amounts are calculated and disbursed. Even minor inconvenience with salaries can cause huge dissatisfaction and attrition among blue-collar employees. Having an HCM platform that provides an accurate and efficient payroll platform proves to be a boon in such a scenario. Furthermore, today’s payroll platforms can be easily integrated with time and attendance tracking systems to bring automation, compliance and scalability to the process. It saves a lot of time that would have been spent on error correction and grievance redressal.
Bottomline
The blue-collar workforce is crucial to the manufacturing industry, and the modern HR technology presents many opportunities to improve their productivity. A digital-first mindset and quick technology adoption is the first step to building an engaged, satisfied and efficient blue-collar workforce.