Finding the right people when they don’t exist!

One of the biggest challenges facing Australian businesses at the moment is finding and recruiting people. It is especially challenging in regional businesses.

I love the book “TheGoal” by Eliyahu and Jeff Cox. This fable is a story about an Executive trying to get a manufacturing plant working efficiently. A key concept to achieve this is the “drumbeat”. The drumbeat is the rhythmical movement of value-add processes in perfect balance and in sync. Think, of a Toyota assembly line. Whilst this applies specifically to manufacturing, the general concept of the drumbeat to create flow can be applied to any workplace.

Typically, unskilled or new people will take a while to get up to speed with learning new tasks. This may cause bottlenecks in the flow of work.

What can we do? Ideally, anything that interrupts the drumbeat should take place outside of the flow of normal work and enter into the process at a specific point in the process.

I have seen some clever solutions regionally to solve this problem. One Engineering business put on eight new apprentices in one go, thus creating an Academy of sorts. The genius was they also hired an ex-TAFE teacher to train the #Apprentices outside of the flow of work and therefore not disrupt the skilled Tradesmen and interrupt the drumbeat.

It can be difficult to think ahead. However, it will be those businesses that build the capacity to drive their long-term business aspirations which will come out with a sustainable competitive advantage.

The performance of our businesses tomorrow will depend on the strategic actions we take today.