When it comes to learning and talent management, HR, L&D, and Talent professionals are all talking about skills.
But for all the talk about the importance of skills-based talent management, few are talking about how skills and skills technology apply to organizations with a predominantly hourly workforce. So why are hourly employees different than salaried employees when it comes to this topic?
Hourly employees typically complete job duties that are more routine, high-volume, transactional, and customer-facing than their salaried colleagues. From machine operators, to retail workers, to healthcare professionals, hourly employees typically must master duties that are repeated many times each shift they work. While the duties vary in difficulty, required training, and time-to-competence, employers rely on tailored training and onboarding programs to deliver predictable timelines and consistent results. Whether identified as a strategy or not, all employers must and do deliver skills-based training. The question is, how intentional is the strategy?
We sat down with Educe Manager Josh Silva to discuss his perspective on how organizations with hourly employees should approach skills-based talent management practices.
Why do you think organizations should consider implementing skills-based talent strategies for their hourly workforce?
Josh: Organizations in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, retail, or food and beverage have many more front-line workers than management or senior positions. Hourly workers complete numerous transactions every hour, often repetitive in nature. The efficiency of each task performed by hourly employees is at the core of scheduling, resourcing, and distribution of duties – i.e., how many employees need to be hired. Each task is a skill – and these skills should be regularly trained, improved, and assessed to reduce error and increase quality output.
But, beyond duties related to efficiency, the identification and development of critical skills that bolster sales and retain customers is an investment for growth. Have you ever left a restaurant, never to come back because of the customer service you received? Alternatively, have you ever left a restaurant spending more than expected because the server brilliantly described ‘today’s specials,’ noticed your drink cup was empty, and talked you into dessert? In industries with large populations of hourly employees, businesses are often competing against their twin – organizations with nearly identical customers, products, value-proposition, and talent markets. Hourly workers change jobs between these companies for clear reasons: better pay, better hours, and more flexibility. Supporting talent outcomes with skill-based talent strategies enables an organization to identify the best employees, reward them with the best benefits, and provide hourly employees with well-earned long-term growth opportunities. A 2020 McKinsey study (before the COVID-19 pandemic) shows that of organizations who have deployed reskilling programs, improvements or significant improvements were realized in multiple critical business results from employee satisfaction to brand perception among customers. This benefits the employee, the customer, and allows organizations to stand out from their competitors.
What are the unique challenges that organizations with a large hourly employee population face when implementing skills-based talent management practices and technology?
Josh: When L&D professionals request funding to implement development programs, they must typically prove to leadership that the program is an investment with clear favorable business outcomes. Implementing a skills-based talent management development program for hourly workers requires significant investment in the form of compensable hours, scheduling, equipment, and the analysis and planning of a development program.
At the core of managing an hourly (particularly a non-exempt) workforce is that organizations must track and pay employees for every hour worked, including training and development hours. Talent professionals must be able to demonstrate a clear cost-benefit analysis showing that the costs of skills-development are investments with clear returns for the organization. While similar cost-benefit analysis may be required for implementing development programs for salaried employees, adding development hours to a salaried employee will not directly increase the compensable wages. Beyond the time spent in training, there is time spent between hourly workers and their managers reviewing and planning development progress.
Hourly workers typically work in a fast-paced environment, performing business-critical job duties. In manufacturing, minute-to-minute attention to detail is critical to ensuring quality outcomes. In the service sector, each customer in line expects attentive service and accurate results. In healthcare, patients’ well-being and lives depend on keen observations and timely reactions. These tasks leave limited opportunity for hourly employees to take a ‘development’ break. For an organization to take one employee off the floor for a 30-minute development session requires that organization to schedule another employee to cover for the same 30 minutes. At scale, or even for one manager, this adds complexities to scheduling, an already time-consuming and demanding management task.
Because hourly workers are likely to share the same workspace (e.g., retail sales floor, manufacturing floor, hospital floors or wings, etc.), are consistently moving, and continuously engaging with customers, patients, or equipment, access to individual personal computers or devices is typically limited. Shared workstations typically facilitate essential tasks, such as clocking in and clocking out, placing orders, or managing point-of-service transactions. Dedicated devices used for talent management purposes require significant up-front investment, the processes and systems require training and support, and the technology requires ongoing maintenance and updates.
Skills-centric development programs for hourly workers require up-front and ongoing investments from talent professionals and management teams to plan, enable, deploy, and continuously improve the programs. Organizations measure onboarding effectiveness by how quickly their employees can perform job duties independently. Many times, the next best development step is to develop expertise in the same tasks and to perform required job duties even more efficiently and with better quality and/or outcomes. This development focus is mutually beneficial to the organization and to the employee, as it produces better service and/or product, and the employee earns merit increases and/or promotions to ‘Senior’ or ‘Lead’. To deploy a skills-based development program for hourly workers, organizations must deploy development offerings that generate tangible upskilling for essential tasks and be intentional to not distract from hourly workers’ core duties with unrelated development offerings.
How can businesses use technology to aid in effectively identifying and documenting skills, and skills proficiencies, required for different hourly roles?
Josh: My colleagues and I attend conferences, participate in user groups, and listen to our clients across industries share how difficult it is to even start planning for skills. The data supports this anecdotal experience – leaders recognize the need for skills-centric talent strategies, but few organizations have deployed or have even started to deploy related programs. In fact, at a recent conference, Educe surveyed over 100 organizations about where they were in their Skills transformation journey and only 4% said that they had implemented Skills management processes and technology. Organizations, small and large, in all industries, are changing faster than ever, and leaders do not feel their organization can adapt, upskill, or reskill fast enough.
At the same time, HR, L&D, and Talent leaders are engaging in resource-heavy and investment-heavy, multi-year skill taxonomy and job-architecture planning projects. The question talent professionals must ask themselves is: ‘When the project is finished in 12-18 months, will the data still be relevant, and if so, for how long?’
A better way to approach skills taxonomies for hourly workforces is to leverage the data leading HCM organizations have been collecting for years. This data, which references billions of data-points, across virtually all industries, and from companies worldwide, can be utilized to deploy an initial skill framework quickly and efficiently. If these tools can deliver an 80%-90% true-to-organization framework, resolving the 10%-20% gap will require significantly less investment and time than the time it would take to build out 100% of the framework and architecture. The technology is now available and if used, this smart technology will enable an organization to effectively identify required job-specific skills at the pace of business.
What should organizations do to get started?
Josh: The skills that hourly workers demonstrate, lack, and want to develop to improve their own performance are reflective of an organization’s pulse. Hourly employees interact with customers most often, they understand machinery at an intimate level, and daily they experience products hands-on. Each job duty comes with its challenges. Each challenge represents a skill gap, and new gaps are created every time the marketplace, the customer, the product, or the service changes. The challenges organizations face deploying relevant and agile skills-centric talent management strategies are significant and notoriously difficult to overcome.
Upskilling and reskilling hourly workers isn’t the starting point for their development, it’s the end result. The starting point for upskilling and reskilling hourly workers is more development-focused, better equipped, and highly trained first-level supervisors. To deploy any talent management strategy to hourly workers, organizations should first focus on deploying regular one-on-ones between first-level supervisors and/or managers. Not only is there an abundance of research showing regular one-on-one’s improve retention, morale, and culture, but it clears the way for short (skills) and long-term (competency) development.
How can employers use technology to ensure ongoing skill assessments, upskilling, and reskilling for hourly workers?
Josh: Organizations should use technology to effectively scale and structure regular and efficient touchpoints between managers and their hourly direct reports. Best-in-class talent management technology allows HR, L&D, and/or Talent professionals to infuse best people practices into templates that make it easy for managers to execute one-on-ones. With guided talking points and questions in a template, managers can regularly capture skill gaps, skill attainment, and aspirational skill development goals in short 1:1s. Furthermore, leading HCM platforms have deployed this technology to mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, freeing managers up to observe, interact, and document notes on-the-go, while allowing them to return to their desktop to finish if necessary.
Lastly, if technology is effectively used to capture essential skill data, then organizations can also use the technology to analyze and act on the data. Business is changing fast, so fast, that executives are doubting their own workforce’s ability to adapt, upskill, and reskill fast enough. As organizations introduce new products and services, hire new leadership, complete M&A initiatives, hourly workers work through the impact of those changes daily. Luckily, talent technology allows organizations to tap into skill-data at scale and BI tools allow organizations to render meaningful analytics into actionable visualizations.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
Josh: Leveraging technology to scale development efforts to the job-specific level is something talent professionals could not do before – it required too many resources and changed too fast – but it is possible now. HR, L&D, and Talent professionals have struggled to develop strategies and processes to deploy and implement these tools. Mandatory and prescriptive processes such as annual reviews, succession planning, compensation management, and compliance training will remain critical to the business and those processes are not going away. However, the introduction of responsive and organic processes, such as skills management and AI-generated skills-based training, are here to stay. Talent teams that only rely on traditional methods to manage workforce compliance, mitigate talent-related risk, and concentrate investment in only senior management development are missing an opportunity to democratize opportunity, find the next generation of talent, and create agile organizations. In contrast, organizations that expand beyond traditional talent processes and adopt skills-centric talent programs can transform their hourly workforce into a competitive advantage over similar and competing organizations. Hourly employees represent the most dynamic part of the workforce, performing critical roles that require immediate adaptation to the most important thing to the business: customers.
