3 Steps to Overcome Skills Shortage for Engineering Businesses

Businesses stand or fall on the quality of their people – don’t you agree? If we cannot have enough staff with the right level of skills and experience, that’s potentially a serious problem.

Today I would like to talk about one of the biggest challenges we do face as a leader in the manufacturing or engineering sector, in fact this apply to any sector, any kind of industry.

Let me put you in the picture:

When we need a new staff, we go to the market to recruit the best person available with the right skills: our challenges are first to find that person, then, to seduce them into our offer and finally sign a contract. Chances are that we never find the perfect fit. Probably because we don’t find the right skills or because when we find it, it is too expensive. In any way we still need the resource and we end up recruiting someone who we think would fit with some training we might do internally. Right?

Once this person is recruited, we train him or her and they get better and better and some months later, what happens??They leave for another opportunity. Or maybe, He or she decided to stay but their level of motivation diminished drastically, impacting the team productivity and performance. The person who we thought would be a good match, we’ve trained and invested is now just doing the minimum and not looking to go the extra mile to thrive, innovate, create and grow with our business.

Do you see the picture? Tell me, how many times it happened to you??Yeah… I know.

Do you know that almost 80% of employees around the world are disengaged with their jobs? Yeah…80%...If you want to change it, stay with me!

My name is Juliana and I am the founder of whatengineerswant.com, we help manufacturing and engineering firms to unlock the potential of their engineers to enhance excellence and innovation.

Today In this video I will talk about 3 steps on how to overcome the skills shortage we are facing in our industry to finally have the dream team that will make the success of your business. So, stay with me if you want to know more.

Let’s summarise. The challenges we are facing are: it is hard to recruit, it is hard to retain, it is hard to keep them motivated and with a high-performance level.

So what to do?

To make the recruitment process easier it is better to Work in our attractiveness, on how we can attract what we need.

To avoid people to leave we need to care about what they really want, and finally to keep them motivated in the long run, we should increase what we call the employee engagement to boost productivity and innovation.

Those are our 3 easy steps to create our dream team.

1. Attract what we need

It is important to understand that people have different expectations and we need to think about what will attract them to our company. Saying that, we need to be smart and creative in presenting job opportunities.

For example, we can make our business stand out by offering attractive conditions and competitive pay; training and career development plans; making new employees feel welcome; being inclusive; Etc etc…there are a bunch of things we can work out to stand out and have a competitive advantage when recruiting.

Defining this competitive advantage is like working in our business. We need to think about what our competitors are offering and work on our unique value to stand out of the mass.

Your business is more likely to attract the best and brightest if you can offer different things from your competitors. So, you need to identify your uniqueness. Got it?

?When we talk about uniqueness is what we stand for, what we value and how we intend to impact people around us. To identify our uniqueness, we need to work out our culture.

When we work out our culture, we work out our reputation and the image of our business. This?is a key factor in attracting people. Because it is our people who can promote our business the best, helping us to recruit without even know about it. To have that reputation, and be the place to work, we need to create a workplace where people want to work, stay and progress. Where they feel safe and comfortable. Where they understand their value and contribute to create impact.

So think about that. What can you do right now to improve your workplace to be more attractive?

When recruiters ask us to define who we are looking for we focus on perfection, we think it is an opportunity to get what we never had and we put down all the skills in the world! So we have 99% chances to never find the perfect match. Specially in the context we are living now.

The key is to forget perfection and focus on skills that we cannot overcome. And what we call soft skills may be much more important than we think. Because training a person on trust, empathy, resilience is much harder than training them on a new technology.

So what are the human skills you are looking for? Try to focus on that next time you are in a recruitment process.

Now let’s say we have found a match and signed the contract. Next step is to figure out how to retain them.

2. Retain the good ones

To retain people the first thing we really need to assimilate is that if we only work on the pay check and the tangible benefits, we are competing with a lot of other business out there! And we don’t want it. So, we need to understand what our employees really want, what they are looking for? And one size doesn’t fit all.

We have in the workforce nowadays 3 different generations, and each generation have different aspirations. To touch each one of them we need to adapt our speech and offer. Millennials are the biggest workforce in the market now. This generation is looking for a purpose, to make a difference, to experience moments more than having comfort and money. They are looking to a reason. We need to answer to that, we need to identify how to respond to their needs and propose the right level of challenge.

Working out our uniqueness will also help to define the purpose of your business and how to communicate that in a way that touches your employees so they can assimilate it as theirs also. A purpose speaks for a reason for existing. Why your business was created for humankind? It sounds a bit lofty but highlighting your business’s benefits helps most employees to feel more engaged and productive.

When we provide people with a reason to come to work that they care about. They will give us the maximum effort and passion, not because they have to, but because they want to.

This reason should be simple and clear to everybody. Everybody in the organisation should be able to define WHY they do what they do?

According to Gallup, “You can?increase employee engagement from?14% to 67%?by simply focusing on purpose”

What lead us to the next point: how to increase employee engagement so that everyone participates actively to make the business success.

3. Increase employee engagement

Employee engagement is about how we create the right conditions in which employees offer more of their capability and potential. Got it?

Employee engagement is based on trust and integrity. It is a two-way commitment between the organisation and its members.

When it works, employee engagement increases the individual performance, productivity and well-being and consequently increases the organisation excellence, innovation and competitiveness.

So lets create those conditions to unlock our people full potential: are you Ready?

First, we need a safe environment.

For sure, we need to provide everybody a workplace with all the measures to keep their physical integration. But having a safe environment is also working in their psychological safety…and what is that?

Psychological safety made simple is the belief that nobody won’t be punished when they make a mistake. The main idea here is to put in place a forgiveness culture. In case of failure we need to celebrate the fact of ‘trying to do so’ instead of punishing.

Let’s clarify it with a bit of neuroscience: When we are in a conflict situation, provocative, or competitive situation, is like being in a life-or-death situation for our brain. The amygdala, known as the alarm bell in our brain, ignites the fight-or-flight response. This alarm hijacks the other parts of our brain, shutting down our capacity of reasoning.?In other words, we lose our minds and our capacity to interact and collaborate, just when we need it the most.

We don’t want our job or any job to be a life-or-death situation. We want to contribute in an environment that respects us, an environment where we trust each other and where we feel to belong so we can give our best.

?So, to keep your people motivated and engaged to go the extra mile is better to give them the right conditions to do so in a safe psychological environment. Give it a try!

I hope this video helped you to see things from a different perspective. The idea is to help you to overcome the labour shortage to still have the dream team working with you.

If you like this video, raise your hand and comment below. Let me know if it was helpful by just writing Yes in the comments below. I’d appreciate.

See you soon!

Juliana Queiroz?is an engineer and founder of What Engineers Want, a consulting company that helps small and medium businesses to unlock their engineers’ full potential towards excellence and innovation.