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How a training program can solve many of your workforce problems

June 15, 2021
Amanda Del Buono speaks with Tom Strong, director of employer action for the National Fund for Workforce Solutions

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many employers to reduce their staffs, but having workers who have the know-how and nurturing their growth is still important. Amanda Del Buono and Tom Strong, director of employer action for the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, discuss the importance of investing in and training employees for the long haul.

Transcript

Amanda Del Buono: Welcome back to Manufacturing Tomorrow's Workforce. I'm Amanda Del Buono.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many employers to reduce their staffs, but having workers who have the know-how and nurturing their growth is still important. Today, I'm joined by Tom Strong, director of employer action for the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, to discuss the importance of investing in and training employees for the longer term.

Thanks for being here today, Tom.

Tom Strong: Thank you for having me here, Amanda. Pleased to be here.

Amanda: Can you first just start by telling our listeners a little bit about the National Fund for Workforce Solutions? What are some of your goals, and how do you work toward achieving them?

Tom: Absolutely. So the National Fund is an organization that was created to foster innovation and workforce development. We envision a world that has an equitable future where workers, employers and the communities where they're based in are all thriving and prosperous. We think the workforce development has a lot of influence in helping us get to that vision. It's just essential to prioritize innovation and new ideas.

As our name suggests, we are all about solutions. We identify solutions to common workforce problems, and there's four solutions that we currently organize our work around. The first one is co-investing for impact in order to achieve local economies of scale. The second is equipping workers for success, that's not just in terms of skill development but also in terms of helping them access resources and build networks to strengthen their voice and their engagement. The third solution that we focus on is changing systems for improved outcomes, and that's all about how do we engage neighborhoods, municipalities and other regional institutions in co-creating lasting change. Finally, we work to activate employers to make jobs better, and that's the program that I lead at the National Fund and I see my job there as about building our entire network's capacity to work productively with employers and help them to create more good jobs for the people who need them. I'll add to that that throughout all these solutions, we see a thread. We look at them through a lens of racial equity and inclusion. Workforce development can't work if it doesn't work for everyone.

Speaking of that network, we couldn't do any of this without our local community partners who we refer to as our collaboratives. There's 28 of them across the country, [and] they're in every kind of community, big cities to the smallest rural areas, and they are usually embedded in community organizations, things like Local Workforce Investment Boards, United Ways, chambers of commerce and community foundations. They work that way because that way they are close to the community, but they're also close to educational institutions, they're close to funders and they're close to employers. Together they work to form industry partnerships to get those different actors working together. They're the laboratories where our work really takes place. We help them. We help them get funding and provide them with technical assistance, and we've built this national network for them to draw upon and learn from each other, but they're the ones who really do the innovation, and they do the work on the ground.

Amanda: Great. Well, focusing more closely on that, I wanted to take a look at one of the projects that you've done in the recent past. I understand in 2020, Boeing provided a grant to implement an on-the-job training program in five communities in the United States. I was wondering, what other programs has the National Fund worked on in the manufacturing industry, and how do these programs benefit those that are involved outside of the National Fund itself?

Tom: That's right. We've been working with Boeing for many years. They've been a terrific supporter of our work. Let's talk about benefits first. The benefit of a program like that one we did with Boeing is really straightforward. It was an investment in on-the-job training, where employers are able to hire people for a limited time with subsidized wages, and during that training period, they are preparing them for the specific needs of the firm. So the employers have this great opportunity to, over kind of an extended orientation, develop and assess that worker's technical skills and understand their ability to work on the team. The workers also benefit from this opportunity because they're earning as they're learning, right? So, they are able to develop a new skill while making a living wage, and most of them get a permanent job out of the arrangement. But even those who don't end up staying with that company, they've developed a new skill set, an experience that is only going to help them on the job market going forward.

Now, on-the-job training has been around for a while. It's a well-understood approach. A big part of what we and our collaboratives brought to this project was more of an equity lens, and we were particularly thinking about manufacturing when we did this. There's a lot of good jobs in manufacturing, but the workforce in that field is still disproportionately white and disproportionately male, as I'm sure you know. We wanted to support more workers of color and more women getting into this industry because there are so many good jobs there. We set a target in the project of helping 200 workers, and we ultimately assisted over 260 of them, beating our original goal by 32%. Across the five collaboratives, over 50% of the workers involved were people of color [and] over 20% were women, which significantly exceeded our goals there as well.

Now, as for the first part of your question about where else we're doing this? There's a couple pieces to that. One is that we engage the manufacturers through our collaboratives through their industry partnerships, and over half of our collaboratives, the 15 in total, do have a long-standing industry partnerships in manufacturing. So, it is a really critical sector for us that's actually the second most of any industry after healthcare. We also lead a number of programs that involve our collaboratives, which are intended to drive innovation across different industries, and usually, those include manufacturers. Most of those programs involve what I described earlier as activating employers to make jobs better, i.e., they are all about job quality and helping employers think more proactively about how can they make a greater, better place to work.

Amanda: Great. That's great to hear how successful the program was, and I presume having those companies involved with you for so long really helps strengthen your fund and what you're able to do in the long term.

Tom: Yeah. Absolutely. We can't do the work we do without strong engagement from employers, and that means we also have to think about our own approach towards employers and making sure that we are providing value to them, and we're helping them think through problems that are real and affect them right now.

Amanda: Right. Well, going beyond that initial training, we at Putman Media have done some surveys through various magazines about job satisfaction, and we often see that employees tend to be more satisfied in their jobs when their employer is offering growth opportunities through training programs and the like. What are some other benefits that manufacturers could see from implementing such programs, if they're still apprehensive about making that investment for some reason?

Tom: So, I'm glad you asked about that. In one of the programs I was just discussing, which is a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we've been examining this question. We have an evaluator we're working with on the project, Ellen Frank-Miller, with the Workforce & Organizational Research Center. And she has been diving into the evidence base about what kinds of workforce practices and characteristics of jobs are associated with different employer outcomes. And she's looking at management studies over decades to figure this out. And what she has seen is that there are five outcomes that are really common for employers who invest in their own frontline workers, and those are improving the intention for turnover. So, not just turnover, which can be measured in different ways, but are people planning? Are they thinking about leaving the company? A second outcome is their commitment to the organization. That's kind of the flip side of that. How much do they kind of feel that the organization cares about them, and therefore they commit to it for the long haul? A third outcome is individual performance. Well, obviously, but if you train people in the technical certification, if you're investing in their skills and development, they will likely perform better on the job. Fourth one is employee engagement. This is one, of course, the Gallup company and many other companies are out there studying. It's been associated with a wide range of positive financial metrics, but it really is a measure of how much are workers kind of thinking about the work. Are they interested and involved in the work that they are doing when they're on the job rather than feeling alienated? And fifth is burnout, a really relevant one this past year because of COVID and how it's affected so many different industries, but investing in your workers, again, not surprisingly, is correlated with reduced burnout levels.

Now, what's interesting about this study, this approach that we're looking at is that each of these outcomes is associated as, I mentioned before, with a range of different job characteristics. So, for instance, if you think about kind of what you mentioned, training and development happening on the job, that is associated with four of those five business outcomes. It's associated with turnover intent, with performance, with engagement and with reduced burnout. That's pretty good. It's excellent, in fact. There's lots of good outcomes to look for there. But there are also some practices that are actually associated with all five of those outcomes. So, for instance, the support that you see yourself as a worker receiving from your supervisor is associated with all of the business outcomes. And, you know, we know about that, right, the adage, like nobody quits their job, they quit their boss. Well, there is a lot of evidence for that in management science. For us, what that tells us is that the workforce development field needs to pay close attention to how these supervisors, kind of what their role is like, how they are interacting with the frontline workers that are on their team, how they are trained and supported. That is a growth area for the field. It is something to the workforce development field's credit that we have been engaging with more deeply in the last decade or so, but the evidence suggests there needs to be a bigger and bigger focus. The takeaway though for your manufacturer listeners for this podcast, if you are thinking about how you can benefit from investing in your employees, don't limit yourself to thinking about job satisfaction. Don't limit yourself to thinking about turnover. Those are obviously great, they matter a lot, but there are actually many other ways that employers can benefit from investing in people.

Amanda: Right. Well, you know, for those who may have decided, "Yeah, it's a good idea for me to invest," what are some of the sticking points that they come up to, or where do they tend to falter when they're creating these programs, and they aren't maybe as successful as they could be?

Tom: In our experience, there are three places where companies get hung up in making this kind of investment. First, they get hung up in being overly transactional in how they think about it. Second, they're not clear with themselves or with their employees about what the value proposition is for the workers at the company. Why should you stay here over the long term? And finally, they may not think much about how learning is something that can leverage, not just as kind of a matter of individual improvement, but actually at the organizational level, how you become a learning organization. At the transactional mindset, a lot of companies will come into this work, and they'll be thinking, "Oh, God, I need 12 CNC operators, and I need them now. Please help me get them. I'll get them working. Everything will be fine." That's just kind of the short-termism, right?

Amanda: Mm-hmm.

Tom: But the thing about short-termism, it's not good for financial markets. That's not good for labor markets either. If you hire those people, and then six months later they leave, you really haven't solved the problem. You just kind of put it off. Earlier in my career, I did some work with a manufacturing company where 40% of its workforce was temporary, and every six months half of them would leave or be fired. And there was just this constant churn, and they were engaged with the workforce system, but they weren't solving the fundamental problem. So the second issue is the value proposition. How do you build a value proposition that is going to be attractive for new workers, for current workers, and keep people for that long-term? This is something where you do want to think about yourself, again, in relationship to your competitors. How do you differentiate yourself? How do you give people a reason to stay? One of my heroes in business, the AT&T executive, Robert Greenleaf, he is widely seen as the founder of the idea of servant leadership. He taught that just as employees serve customers, like the role of managers is to provide service to the front-line workers in the company. And doing that means thinking about okay, like, "What are the things that our employees value? How can we make sure that this is a job that helps them advance their lives and getting the benefits in life that they are really seeking to get out of working here?" And if you do that, you'll build an organizational culture that your people will thrive in. Finally, there is a tendency across our society to think about learning as just a matter of individual achievement, right? It goes from kind of just elementary school or middle school, like you get a report card, it's got grades on it. That's your individual achievement. Later in life, you may graduate with a certificate or with a degree, that's your individual achievement. And both among employers and in the workforce world, we tend to think about this as kind of one by one, what this individual has achieved, kind of what we do with that individual investment.

In my experience, and I think in the National Fund's experience as well, what we see is that learning can also happen on the organizational level and that the highest performing companies often get that way because they commit to being centers of learning, learning organizations. So, for instance, there's a metalworking company that spoke at our conference a few years ago, and in their break room, they have this giant whiteboard that they call the skills matrix. And on that whiteboard, in the Y-axis, you see the names of all the employees on the shop floor, and on the X-axis, you see the name of every machine that they used in the facility. And when someone masters a new machine, they get a check in the appropriate box, and they get a raise associated with kind of acquiring a new skill. And what this is, is it is a very kind of public way of acknowledging people's learning, of rewarding them for it, but also figuring out how that can turn into an investment for the entire company because, when you get enough people skilled in a machine, you can expand your use of that machine.

Amanda: Yeah. That's smart.

Tom: And you can also start thinking strategically, "What can we automate next? How can we better leverage the technology that is out there for this company?" So, thinking about your investments in people, it doesn't just translate to the individual performance, but it can actually help you build kind of a more agile company as well that can better take advantage of new opportunities.

Amanda: That's smart of that manufacturer that really gives the employees an incentive to want to learn new things rather than just, you know, come in and cash their paycheck every week or every two weeks.

Tom: Yeah. It really does. They're a really engaged place to work, and the founder told me years ago that they think of everyone who works there as entrepreneurs themselves, and they really cultivate that mindset throughout the company.

Amanda: That's great. There's a lot of culture that goes into that and then working on building that culture within a company, I presume.

Tom: Yeah. That's exactly right. Culture is a big part of the value proposition. Often we will hear from companies, especially doing work with them around job quality, which is a fairly sensitive topic to talk about with a company, we'll hear, "We're losing people to the company down the street that is paying them 25 cents more an hour." And we're all about, you know, making sure that people are paid well and they can live good lives and are paid based on the work that they do, but if you're losing people for 25 cents an hour, there's likely other things that are happening in your company that are making it a more unpleasant place to work. And that supervisor thing, that is one of them that comes up a lot.

Amanda: So, if you were looking to improve upon your training program if you were a manufacturer, what would be your first steps? How would you suggest that one gets started on such an endeavor? And maybe where can they go to find help if they need it?

Tom: So first of all, just know that you don't have to go it alone. Maybe there's a National Fund collaborative near you. I would recommend everyone who hears this podcast to check out our map on our website and see if there's a collaborative nearby. But even if there isn't, there is probably a workforce agency or a community-based organization, a training provider, a non-profit or for-profit that you could engage with that could become a thought partner for you at the very least.

Similarly, you don't have to invest alone. You've got competitors out there. While you do want to differentiate yourself from them, of course, every company both collaborates and competes, right? You've got your industry association. You work with your competitors through that. Workforce is another area where you can think about areas where you can collaborate or compete. And it's likely if you talk to your competitors, you're probably having some of the same problems when it comes to people and people management. It might be that you can co-invest on the same solutions. That's one thing I would recommend that you think about as you get started.

I would encourage listeners to check out some of the tools on the National Fund website. We have a number of very useful toolkits that can help you think about these challenges. One of them is our job design framework, which is kind of a menu of options for thinking about how you can build that value proposition for your new and your future employees as well as your current employees. The job design framework basically looks at all the different elements of the job, all the key ways in which work is recognized and supported by the company, and basically asks people to think about, what is the area that you can work on right now? And choose that. Start there. You don't have to do everything all at once. But if you choose one thing that you know is an issue for your company right now, you will probably start making real strides.

Another tool that we have is our financial wellness guide. Several years ago in one of our job quality projects, we learned from a couple of our manufacturer partners that they saw investing in financial wellness for their employees as a key priority. They were aware of the issue in our society that a lot of people don't have even the cash to pay a $400 out-of-pocket expense upfront, and they wanted to work on that because they knew it was impeding people's ability to work well on the job. So, they developed a financial wellness program with our support and started getting their employees learning about their own personal finance, but also helping them to build a savings account. And over the last five years, one of these companies, they saw the collective savings of their employees in this program go from, I think, about $30,000 in the first or second year to when we recently interviewed them, it was over a million dollars today.

Amanda: Wow. That's awesome.

Tom: Yeah. We were really pleased to hear about that.

Amanda: Well, I'm curious going forward, you know, what can we see from the National Fund for Workforce Solutions in the near future? What plans are on the horizon?

Tom: So, we have a couple new products that either have just come out or will come out soon that your listeners may be interested in. Just a couple weeks ago, we published our guide to a trauma-informed approach to workforce development. And at first, you and your listeners may hear that and kind of think, "Oh, that's healthcare," right? It actually applies to every industry. It is a guide towards working with people who have had very diverse experiences, including some negative experiences or some significant hardship in their life. And that is something that impedes a lot of people's work. We've had, not just national, but global lesson in that in the last year plus now with the pandemic and how significantly that has affected so many workplaces, so many individuals. So, we think that'll be a really useful tool for helping companies to think through, "How do you work with specific populations as you do this?"

And then one other tool that we're coming out with in the next month or so is that as part of that work with the Gates Foundation, we're taking those lessons about business outcomes, the five outcomes that I identified earlier and the associated job characteristics, and we are building them into a set of visualized maps. So, you can actually see the relationship between the 30 or so job characteristics, how each one is associated with a business outcome. And to think about kind of starting from this place of what outcome do you wanna get. As you invest in your people, this will provide you with a range of potential ways to identify an intervention or a test that you can pilot. So we're excited about that coming out, and again, look for it in the next few weeks.

Amanda: Those both sound like really great resources and something that we should make sure everybody has access to. So, we'll try to be sure to share those links when they're available and more information.

Tom: Wonderful.

Amanda: Thank you, Tom, for being here today and sharing all your insights and information with us. I think that there's a lot here that will hopefully convince those who might be on the edge to make the commitment and hopefully further encourage those who are already working towards this. So, we appreciate that.

Tom: Absolutely. I'm really happy to be here. And I will say that in closing, we're always happy to talk to manufacturers. Feel free to reach out to us. My email is [email protected]. Even if we can't help someone directly, we might be able to point you to resources or other partners that you can draw upon.

Amanda: Wonderful. Well, thank you again, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in today. For "Manufacturing Tomorrow's Workforce" I'm Amanda Del Buono. Stay tuned for our next episode. Have a great day.

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