Balancing the Need to Raise Wages with the Need to be Competitive by Increasing Worker Value

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc

It is said employers are having a hard time finding workers. It may be due to some workers having time to think during the disruptions of the past few years and may be looking for jobs that are better aligned with their career goals. Some may still fear the status of the Covid-19 cases, and its variants, made confusing by the premature, incomplete and contradictory news reports. Some may want to return to work but are navigating the difficulties of child care and return to school policies that vary from district to district.

It appears employers have accepted that, for the short term at least and quite possibly the long-term, that they will need to reconsider their compensation structures if they are to attract the caliber of worker they need. Some feel that discussion is long overdue. Of course, raising wages and benefits is going to add to the cost of labor associated with production or services. If the shortage of supplies raising the costs of goods accelerate the reshoring of jobs to America, the competition for the best workers could get fierce.

For decades employers have been laxed in their need to develop the most productivity and worker capacity from their workforce. It became more a hunt for “bodies“ than for developing more skilled workers. Most employers like to think that their in-house programs for training workers, once hired, meets their needs, but scratching the surface in most cases proves that there is very little structure, no plan, there is no documentation, and no sense of purpose. For most employers, people are hired, they are paired up with one of the existing workers and, hopefully, the existing subject matter expert will transfer expertise to the new worker to a level that, one day, might be recognizable.

Some companies that are struggling with high turnover, and/or a surge of growth, see many of these workers can get lost in the shuffle. Some continue to hire more “bodies” who then wait for someone to train them to do something.  Workers that could have been star performers are let go because there is no structured way to measure the outcome of the training process to anyone’s satisfaction. Then again, many workers leave employers when they discover that there is no way to improve themselves in the job classification.

It is always been the conception that the more a worker can do, the more they will be compensated. If there is no way to get to that point, it is difficult at best for the employee to improve – not only for the employer’s sake but for the employee’ livelihood, wellbeing and job satisfaction. It seems like a simple question, but why are many employers averse to training workers to the highest level as quickly as possible so that the employer can derive the benefit from that value? It is akin to maximizing the investment it a piece of equipment purchase to improve productivity. How can employer maximize the return on worker investment if no deliberate effort is made to develop it?

There is a way to mitigate the inevitable rising labor costs with higher worker value, and higher worker ROI.

Proactive Technologies’ focus has always been structuring the unstructured, haphazard, unmeasurable and undocumented on-the-job training that most employers suffer through into a very structured, documented, measurable, and improvable structured on-the-job training experience. It not only opens up opportunities for building new-hires into replicas of the existing star performers as quickly as possible, it also opens avenues for credentialing for the employees as they progress to higher levels of job mastery; an added bonus to mastering the job classification.

Once in place, the program acts like an apprenticeship whether registered or not. Proactive Technologies provides the technical support to set-up, support and provide the monthly technical reporting. Proactive Technologies trains the employer’s existing informal on-the-job trainers to be more efficient, more deliberate and consistent. Proactive Technologies will even research and apply for state grants that will help the defray the employer’s investment to set and implement the programs from set-up through the structured on-the-job training delivery and periodic job-data revalidation.

Any employer can build a “world-class” structured on-the-job training program for every job, every employee and recover their investment as well. All the improvements to the the employer’s bottom line are a plus. If an employer can realize the improved worker capacity, work quality and quantity, and compliance, raising wages and benefits just makes sense.

Proactive Technologies’ helps employers build and implement a structured on-the-job training system approach to expedite each worker’s accelerated path toward full job mastery. To see how it might work at your firm, your family of facilities or your region. Contact a Proactive Technologies representative today to schedule a GoToMeeting videoconference briefing to your computer. This can be followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues. A 13-minute promo briefing is available at the Proactive Technologies website and provides an overview to get you started and to help you explain it to your staff. As always, onsite presentations are available as well.