Every CEO I know is worried about employee retention. The questions are almost always the same. How do we reduce turnover? How do we keep our best people from leaving? How do we compete when another employer offers a dollar or two more an hour?
After spending much of my career designing and commissioning factories, I think we’re taking the wrong approach. We should focus on how building a company employees wouldn’t want to leave in the first place.
In manufacturing, turnover has become so common that many companies simply accept it as part of doing business. For some functions such as consumer electronics contracting, labor-intensive food processing, and temp heavy/light manufacturing and assembly, the lowest-paid positions turn over at more than 100% every year. In these cases, this means every one of those jobs is refilled annually—sometimes more than once.
Companies often measure turnover by the stack of applications they process and the number of drug tests they pay for. They budget for churn because they’ve come to expect it.
I don’t think we should accept this.
When our team walks into a factory to develop an automation strategy, you may be surprised that one of the first things we study has nothing to do with equipment.
It’s employee turnover. Turnover tells us something important because it shows us where the work is most broken.
Most companies begin an automation project by asking, “What can we automate?” Instead, we’ve learned to ask a better question: “What are the jobs people keep leaving?”
These are rarely the jobs where employees use judgment, solve problems, or develop new skills. They’re repetitive, physically demanding, and ergonomically difficult jobs. These are the roles where someone leaves after four months because they can’t imagine doing these same tasks for the coming four to 10 years.
THIS IS WHERE AUTOMATION BEGINS
Our approach to automation strives to eliminate the work people never wanted to do in the first place. This is where I think many leaders still misunderstand automation. Too often, their focus is on finding ways to reduce labor costs.
In my experience, the best automations are designed to achieve something much more valuable: increase the value of the people who remain.
When repetitive tasks disappear, employees rise to managerial roles where they work collaboratively with robots instead of repeating physical motions that wear their minds and bodies down and lead to injury. They learn software instead of simply loading parts. They become troubleshooters, trainers, and system experts instead of performing the same manual tasks thousands of times per week.
We often invite employees to volunteer for what our team jokingly calls robot university—months of training to help install, commission, troubleshoot, and eventually teach others how to operate new automation systems. Something remarkable happens every time.
The first employees to raise their hands almost always become the factory’s cultural leaders. Yes, they are learning new technology. But more importantly, they are also building careers. Before long, their coworkers are asking how they can join in. An automation project quickly becomes a leadership development program.
AUTOMATION IS MORE THAN A TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENT
I don’t think of automation as merely a technology investment. I believe it’s one of the most overlooked people investments a company can make, for the following reasons:
- Employees stay where they grow.
- They stay where they’re trusted with better tools.
- They stay where they’re continually learning.
- They stay where they can see a future.
For years we’ve tried to solve turnover with better recruiting, better perks, and better HR programs. Those all have their place.
But lasting loyalty is built much earlier. It’s built the moment an employee realizes, “This company is investing in me.”
I repeat this often: The companies that reduce turnover in the next decade will move quickly, and they’ll be the innovators who use technology to create safer work, more meaningful careers, and a culture where the best people stay because they choose to—not because they don’t have a choice.
For decades we’ve been focusing on employee retention. Now it’s time to work on becoming the kind of company people don’t want to leave.
Matthew Chang is a founder and primary engineer at Chang Robotics.