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Employers would be better off acknowledging the special challenges of industrial work, and reshaping the onboarding experience to address their particular burnout vectors: wages that top out too low, schedules that are inflexible and too hard to plan around, work that’s either backbreakingly hard or insulting.
The First 90 Days Are Where You Win or Lose the Hire
Transition of roles within the industry is not uniform during the employee’s time in the job. It mostly happens in the first three months and the earliest resignations are the costliest ones as the recruitment, background verification, PPE, and daily wage for training completed are already spent on the person before he decided to leave. According to SHRM research, the cost to replace an employee is about 50-60% of his annual salary and for a more skillful position that might go up to 200% of the annual salary. For a plant working with optimum headcount, it’s not about the line item under HR but about the production that’s hampered.
Orientation and onboarding always get confused but they are not the same things. Orientation is merely the start-up paperwork, badge photo, and a safety video but onboarding is spread in 60 to 90 days ensuring to include training, social acceptance, and performance check-ins in the process. If your ‘onboarding’ has stopped on day one, you probably don’t have an onboarding program but an orientation program with the other name including a bad catch rate in week three.
Standardize it Across Every Plant, Then Measure it
Multi-site industrial companies have a specific version of this problem: onboarding quality varies wildly by plant, because it usually depends on whoever happens to be running it at that location. One site might have a great buddy system taking new employees under their wing while feeling skillfully managed and on pace, while another site manager may still be sifting through some old dusty binders counting on the best.
Using a digital checklist platform, for example, is a way to eliminate this issue by making the process exactly the same everywhere. Every new hire gets the same pre-boarding communication, the same skill-tracking, the same check-in schedule, and every site manager can see where a given hire is in the process without guessing. For teams building this out, it’s worth working from a documented set of manufacturing onboarding best practices rather than making plans as they go.
Once their onboarding program is in place, you can measure it. Track turnover at 30, 60, and 90 days, and again at one year, broken out by site and by shift. That’s where onboarding will turn from a vague HR initiative into something that you can measure a return on and the only way you’ll know if the changes you’re making are actually keeping people past the point where they’d otherwise have walked.
Start Before the First Shift, Not on it
Many new hires decide to leave before even beginning work. A common issue in industrial hiring is that people don’t show up on the first day, and most of these problems are caused by poorly communicated logistical issues. For example, applicants are not told which entrance to use, where parking is located, what personal protective equipment (PPE) must be brought by them and what will be provided, the exact start time of their shift, or if there’s a briefing before time begins.
Pre-boarding is a solution that requires little to no costs. Simply send a short message before the work start-date that explains what their first week will look like. This should include information about their schedule, dress code, necessary safety equipment, and who their supervisor will be. It might sound simple, but new employees that arrive already knowing what to do and bring are less likely to quit.
Train on the Equipment They’ll Actually Run
Training programs typically have both classroom and hands-on components. The classroom part is more about theory and overview to give workers the context of what they’ll be doing. This is where you might talk about company values or diversity or quality standards or what the safety gear is and why it’s important.
But then you have to go to the floor and actually teach them to do the job. And at some point, you have to let them do the job, which is going to be two or three times slower than the experienced worker doing it and may result in inferior product at first, until they get the hang of it. That’s unavoidable: you can’t learn to do a thing as fast as a pro does it six months in. That’s why you’re training.
Pair Every New Hire With Someone Who’s Already Survived the Job
Lack of social connection can lead to hourly employee turnover more quickly than other factors. When a new employee doesn’t know anyone and doesn’t know who to turn to if they have a problem and eats lunch alone for two weeks, then they are on their way out the door. A buddy system can solve this problem by pairing the new employee with an existing one for the same shift.
Of course, this doesn’t work if the existing employee isn’t trained for the responsibility and if time isn’t allocated for it during their workday. You can’t just assign a mentor and expect everything to magically work out without considering the impact of the additional responsibilities on their time. If they’re expected to shoulder the new responsibility in addition to their existing duties, then they’re going to resent the new employee and likely the entire program will fail. If you implement it correctly, then having a mentor is one of the best indicators of someone making it through their first month, often a better indicator than pay.
Safety Training Isn’t a Box You Check Once
One of the main reasons why industrial workers quit early is because they feel a safety risk, and a lot of that risk solidifies in the first week. If someone feels like they were thrown in front of a machine that can hurt them and no one showed them how to stay safe around it, that’s a fear that lingers until they realize they can do the job without getting hurt. Safety compliance, OSHA basics, site-specific hazard training, machine guarding, will all be part of the monthly, or even more frequent, touchpoints during the first month. This training isn’t a one-and-done thing, it’s about reinforcing what they’ve learned and providing a safe spot for questions they might not have wanted to ask in front of a group on day one. What the touchpoints really do is send the message that the company assumes they’re worth saving.
Give People a Visible Path, Not Vague Promises
General cultural messages are not as effective for hourly wage workers in a factory, as they would be for people in an office setting. What works is answering the simple question “what do I get if I’m good at this?” This can be facilitated by implementing a skills matrix or competency checklist, which is already a familiar concept in lean manufacturing environments. It will make new employees aware of what they must learn, master, and what achievements will allow them to earn a shift preference, a salary increase, or a promotion to a better-paid position.
This is even more important with younger workers. Whether for better or for worse, millennials and Gen Zs sound to be more likely to leave a job if it is not clear how they are doing or how to earn more money. Having a checklist that is clear about “you’ve signed off on these six competencies, three more to go before you’re qualified for X” turns the job from abstract to something that is progressing. The power dynamic is changing, and to keep pace, manufacturers need to do a better job of defining what “good at this” looks like, early and often.
Structured Check-ins That Catch Problems Before They Quit
A 30-60-90 day plan is effective because it initiates discussions that would not take place otherwise. Managers are preoccupied with maintaining operations, and a new employee who is quietly dissatisfied with their work hours or frustrated with a particular machine is unlikely to come forward with this information. They’ll simply fail to return one day.
Regular check-ins at the 30, 60, and 90-day marks give the new hire a formal reason to pose the question, “How’s everything, really?” and to look for the tell-tale signs associated with pay, hours, and equipment, the top three silent drivers of early exits. These check-ins do not have to be lengthy. Fifteen minutes and a short checklist are sufficient to catch the issue early enough to do something about it, as opposed to hearing it in an exit interview you never bothered to schedule.
Shift Work Changes How Onboarding Has to Run
A training program that revolves around typical 9-to-5 schedules is not suitable for employees working night shifts or rotating shifts because they will have less contact with their supervisor, fewer opportunities for informal evaluations, and often won’t have access to the person responsible for conducting the onboarding sessions during the day. Night-shift employees will, by default, get less effective training, and this will be reflected in their specific employee retention rates.
To solve this issue, mentor assignments should be spread out to cover all shifts, training sessions should be converted to digital content that can be accessed at any time, and supervisors must be regularly scheduling evaluation meetings with night-shift trainees, without leaving this responsibility to others. None of this is too difficult to implement. The important thing to remember is that coverage must be a component of the overall onboarding plan, just like any other issue.
