How Healthy Is Your #Manufacturing Workforce?

If you're a business owner, you want to have the "best workforce money can buy."

Whenever I talk to business owners about their operations, we invariably wind up talking about HR issues. The two most common are; 1) how to manage the employees I have and 2) how do I hire good people? It turns out these two apparently diverse concerns are closely related.

How you say? Well, if you hire good people, you don’t have as many HR issues day-to-day." But

David, how do we hire the “right” people that “fit” our company?"

Well, as with most things, it takes a bit of planning. You must take the time to put down on paper the skill set you are looking for along with a very introspective look at your company culture. Do you have a diverse workforce or not? Will it be affected by bringing in a trained individual at a higher wage or will a promotion from within be more accepted? These kinds of questions along with a good job description will give you a good base of check-off items that any candidate will have to meet.


In addition, you should consider some kind of math or other skills (MS Office for example) test to determine if the candidate is truly what they say they are. You should plan on checking the references and background of finalists once the narrowing-down has occurred. Drug screening should also be included.

How does this affect managing your employees? It is not too much of a stretch to say that if qualified employees are hired with the appropriate mindset, chances are, they will be easier to manage. Note that I have not used the word “easy”. It’s never easy, but with proper work up-front coupled with a complete employee handbook; theoretically, the best possible situation has been setup.

Unfortunately, some hires don’t work out. If that’s the case, you must adhere to the saying “Hire slow, fire fast”.  Suck it up and do what is required. Without quick action to correct the mistake, the new hire can turn into a cancer and turn the workforce sour.


Primary $Profit Power$ Point (you can use today!)

"Check to see if you have an employee handbook
that is available to all workers in your company.  If
they don't all have a copy, get them one.  If you
don't have an employee handbook, call me and
I'll talk with you about how to create one."