Your people are your business. Global skills shortages could impact your ability to innovate and affect your business’s future competitiveness and bottom line. By investing in new technologies, you can make your company a more appealing place to work. This can help make attracting new talent much easier and help to ensure that skilled workers stick around.

We know that IT strategy plays a vital role in this. That’s why we’re here to support you with the critical infrastructure needed to make your business more connected and talent-centric.

The challenges in today’s economic and industrial landscape are manifold. Manufacturers must:

• Solve communication and connectivity challenges caused by decentralised and hybrid working
• Manage the feelings of job insecurity caused by emerging technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation
• Address the shortage of skilled workers that can make maintaining capacity difficult, including increasing output
• Focus on employee engagement and development to retain skilled workers
• Transform product development, production and distribution to meet consumer demand—and increasingly regulations to increase sustainability
• Keep safety at the top of the agenda as change affects the whole business
• Secure company data, including employees’ personal information such as health records

Incorporating technologies such as automation, AI and robots can be transformative. By creating a platform for innovation, you can help the business meet its strategic goals and make the workplace safer, greener and more appealing to new talent.

Use technology to attract and retain top talent.

Technology can transform how you’re perceived by potential new employees. However, fully embracing innovation requires the right infrastructure. This needs to be flexible and robust. It should be able to take security threats and unexpected events in its stride. It also should be able to support dispersed workforces, growth, and ongoing innovation and change.

It's important to recognise the changing expectations and attitudes of skilled workers. What has inspired and engaged workers in the past may not apply any more. Much has been written about Millennials and Gen Z, but employees of all ages expect greater flexibility, as well as expect their employer to share values such as diversity, inclusion and sustainability.

With the infrastructure to support innovation and new technology, you can attract and retain talent by:

• Building a reputation as an innovator and technological leader that invests in development
• Widen your prospective pool of talent by offering flexibility and hybrid working.
• Offer more interesting roles by using automation, robots, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and drones to reduce drudgery and focus employees on more value-adding tasks
• Leverage AI and technologies like augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) or metaverse, to provide continuous development and on-the-job support and guidance.

Stagnation can be a red flag to investors. The same goes for today’s job seekers and employees. A recent article in Forbes suggested that “thrilling innovation” ¹ will bring back a “refreshing ‘cool’ factor and enviable excitement” ² to the manufacturing industry as a whole.

Use technology to upskill and engage your workforce.

Regardless of the generation they belong to, workers want to feel supported, motivated and connected to their organisation and its values. It’s no secret that employees who believe in, and have bought into, the direction and the values of their business are more productive and likely to stay with the company longer. Technology can help by:

• Improving training development using immersive technologies such as AR and VR. This can excite and engage workers, improving safety and productivity.
• Enabling mobile tools and applications that give employees everything they need to get their jobs done without being tied to a fixed location.

Another vital area for consideration is your workers’ concerns toward automation and job security. For IT strategists, the promise of these technologies is hugely exciting. They promise more output, better quality control, and increased productivity and efficiency. However, that enthusiasm may not be shared by those working on the shop floor.

There is some good news. It appears that workers’ attitudes toward AI and automation are shifting, especially as they get first-hand experience of how AI and automation can make their work day easier and more rewarding. A study by Harvard Business Review found that 42% of workers thought that robots have the potential to improve safety conditions, and 60% had a positive sentiment toward their use within the workplace.³ 

To maintain employee morale and engagement, businesses must think about how they can use these technologies to aid and improve their workers’ day-to-day activities.

Use technology to make the workplace even safer.

Anything less than total workplace safety is unacceptable, which is why manufacturers must constantly try to improve their safety across all their sites and facilities. Excitingly, we are now in an age where technologies can help ensure safety in the workplace automatically. This can dramatically reduce human error and accidents. 

Here are a few examples of how you can leverage these technologies:

• Use sensors and intelligent video analytics to automatically shut down machines when they detect workers aren't wearing the correct safety gear
• Use drones and AI to detect when someone has entered a dangerous or off-limits zone, and automatically cease the operation of the equipment before anybody gets hurt
• Use intelligent camera-mounted AGVs to identify where protocols aren’t being followed and additional training is required
• AI and digital twins can overlay training instructions on machines to ensure they are being used correctly and safely

Supported by a robust and secure network, these technologies help manufacturers pave the way to a safer, more productive and efficient workplace for everyone.

To make your business an attractive place to work and stay, you need to be able to make your manufacturing even more people-focused. By establishing a secure and robust network, you can support technologies that can help create an engaged, trained and connected workforce; a safer and less stressful working environment; and a future-looking business with bright prospects.

IT strategy plays such a critical role in the health of their business’s human resources. Let’s co-innovate and enable game-changing, people-focused wins across your entire infrastructure. Verizon has worked with many manufacturers and helped them put people at the forefront of their business. Our industry experts have decades of relevant experience, enabling them to provide practical and effective advice. Our global network, computing and security expertise and extensive ecosystem can help you put those ideas into practice. We can help you de-risk transformation, boost productivity and achieve the promise of Industry 4.0.