Rotating Staff, Worker Retention becomes key Design Considerations

After 2 weeks in Asia, and the 2 weeks before travelling Australia and USA, the concern of worker retention, and the different attitude of the Gen  Y, rotating work force is of real concern.  In China they already shifted to an educated GenY late Gen x population of workers keen to learn, jump to experience rapidly. With this comes ambition to change, and experience so many discussions talked centered on worker retention.

This discussion will continue to grow as people realize the reality that people will take on roles for shorter times, rotating locations, or advancing the ladder, moving from company to the company as opportunities arise. In software; we saw this in the “.com” era, where we saw a 20% turn over, but with that we saw  evolution in the work environment.  The idea as attract and retain people, with both interesting work, and an environment which has services and facilities to make people want to stay.

The same is starting to happen in the industrial sector with the “Integrated Operational Center”, bringing operators and experts into environments that and better for families, and working, as well as enhancing  collaboration, increasing agility. As we go through the next 5 to 10 years in the transition from “Baby boomer” and Gen X to Gen Y, the learning of a role, situation must be different. It must enable:

·         Self-Education

·         The ability to Ask and learn, this means knowledge systems at the finger tips no matter what device, location, or situation.

·          To learn on the job, “Youtubes” and knowledge embedded into operational experience

·         The ability to access experience through collaboration with experts no matter where they.

As stated in earlier blogs; this must become a part of the design of Operational, process, maintenance and operational management experiences. Not an afterthought, but just a natural configuration as people do today with alarms, they should configure knowledge access. If you are sitting designing operational experiences at the moment, sit back and allow yourself time to understand how you will add the learning experience so that the user will be able to become experienced and capable in an efficient time.

The two countries I am seeing this change most pronounced are China and South Africa, as they both have an educated Gen Y coming through more rapidly than in most countries to fill a void of Baby boomer and Gen X. The demand for a new generation of experience will grow, and Advanced Process Graphics will help, but experience must be embedded.