Nickel in demand

operations
and development efforts. After all, if
manufacturers cannot bring in talent
with the skills needed, steps can be
taken to expand the skills based on
the existing workforce.
Harold L. Sirkin is a Chicagobased
senior partner of The Boston
Consulting Group (BCG), a professor
at Northwestern University’s Kellogg
School of Management, noted in
BusinessWeek, “The average age of a
highly skilled U.S. manufacturing worker
is 56. Now is the time to train the next
generation. With all the unemployed
and underemployed college graduates
now living in their parents’ basements,
we’d be foolish not to recognize this as
a tremendous talent asset. We need to
recruit them and train them to create
the skilled workforce U.S. manufacturing
will need as the baby boomers retire.”
Sirkin offers the notion that retention
requires a shift, “Maybe U.S. factories will
have to change a bit to accommodate
their interests: lattes, rather than
lunch pails. But that’s not a bad thing.”
Dickmeyer at People Driven Performance
suggested that employee retention is
the measure of how long employees
stay with a manufacturing or industrial
company. Although personal reasons
may inspire a skilled plant floor worker
to depart his/her place of employment,
most often these experienced company
employees (often with a decade of
dedicated service to a company) leave
because they do not like where they are
working. The cause might be colleagues,
atmosphere, culture, compensation, the
management, the boss, or any of the
above. Employee engagement activities
raise employee retention within an
organization. Employees stay because
they are more fully engaged and do better
work. Dickmeyer noted, “A high level of
employee engagement will always keep
Louise Dickmeyer,
President of
PDP Solutions
© 2014 PDP Solutions
your staff on board for longer. And a
high rate of employee engagement goes
hand-in-hand with a robust employee
communications solution. A high rate
of employee retention has no downside.
You get better work out of an employee
and for longer, as well as save money on
recruitment costs.”
According to the Corporate
Leadership Council, driving performance
and retention through employee
“a high rate of employee
engagement goes hand-inhand
with a robust employee
communications solution”
BE Monthly [ Aug 2014 ] 17