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With vaccines rolling out, some workers are returning to their normal duties. Some manufacturers, however, may find themselves short-staffed and back in search of employees, a difficult endeavor prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. With more people out of work, can manufacturers more easily recruit from a larger pool of potential workers?
In this episode, Amanda Del Buono discusses how manufacturers can recruit in a post-pandemic environment with Tom Moriarty, professional engineer, certified maintenance and reliability professional, certified asset reliability practitioner, MBA in business administration, President of Alidade M.E.R. Inc., and columnist for Putman Media’s Plant Services magazine.
Transcript
Amanda Del Buono: Welcome back to Putman Media's Manufacturing Tomorrow's Workforce. I'm Amanda Del Buono.
Today, I'm joined by Tom Moriarty, professional engineer, certified maintenance and reliability professional, certified asset reliability practitioner with an MBA in business administration, and president of Alidade MER, Inc., as well as a columnist for Putman Media's Plant Services magazine.
Thanks for joining me today, Tom.
Tom Moriarty: Oh, well, thanks for having me, Amanda. I appreciate it.
Amanda: Of course. And today, Tom and I are going to take a look ahead into 2021 to discuss how manufacturers can work on their workforces in 2021 after dealing with everything we did in 2020.
So originally, when we scheduled our interview, I wanted to kind of look ahead at when we start to see the economy recover and companies hiring again, but a recent article in the Wall Street Journal made me wonder if we should start first with the current state of manufacturing workforces.
The Wall Street Journal article reports that executives at some manufacturers are heading to the factory floor as a result of labor shortages. What are you seeing? How are manufacturers managing this? And what strategy do you think could be used to help prevent some of these bottlenecks and ease tension on the staff who is working and is on site?
Tom: Yeah. So, the first thing I would say is that it's rarely a good idea to have an executive trying to fill a skilled operator or maintenance person's position. You're probably an extremist if that's happening, right? So, I do support under normal circumstances having executives to periodically walk the plant floor, but their focus in doing that should be more about letting the people in the plants see them actually walking through the facilities so that, basically, the workers see the executives seeing them at what they're doing. A second positive thing for executives to be on a plant floor is so that they can see firsthand what's going on so that they get a better appreciation for the issues and the need to solve those problems. A friend of mine, Joe Kuhn, has a podcast called "Lean Driven Reliability," and he always talks about walk circles. So, you know, executives and managers getting out of their desks and going down and physically observing what's going on.
What I have been seeing lately is that organizations that have achieved what I call organizational reliability, they tend to do better, and those are organizations that really have a good clean set of direction, guidance and assets. Those organizations that don't really have good policies, plans, processes, procedures, measures, good orientation and training programs, and those sorts of things, they tend to struggle a lot more because workers can only perform at an extraordinary high level for a very finite period of time. After that, then they start getting burnt out, and many already have. And so that's where, I think, you're seeing...you know, in some cases, you're seeing people obviously being sick with the virus, but in other cases, people are just getting burnt out, and they could be getting ill effects just from being burnt out.
So what I've been seeing in these larger manufacturers is that a lot of the leadership team are networking or they're checking in remotely. They're not spending any more time on the plant floor than absolutely necessary. And those that have good management information systems, you know, the ability to maybe see the management information systems, whether that's a CMMS or a production information system. If they can see those things remotely, if there are IT set up in their security, cybersecurity allows them to do that, then they can do that pretty well. Smaller manufacturers though often struggle a lot more when things are tight like this. So, that's kind of what I've been seeing.
Amanda: Okay. That's interesting. That's a good point that this could be maybe more of an exception than to the rule with what the Wall Street Journal was showing. Well, hopefully, that's good, right?
Tom: Yeah. You know, I'm sure it's happening, but I would really hope it doesn't happen too much.
Amanda: Well, and I was thinking in line with this, the need for workers isn't necessarily a new challenge in manufacturing. We've been discussing recruitment issues since we started this podcast in 2018. And when we started it, one of the main goals was to help manufacturers figure out how they could attract new talent, but now with COVID creating so much job loss, it seems to me that that means that there's a much larger pool of potential workers available than there might have been a few years ago.
So, how can manufacturers take advantage of this new and potentially larger potential now that, not now maybe, but once they start hiring new people? What can they be doing to make their jobs appealing to that pool of potential workers?
Tom: Right. I mean, all of the listeners have known that there's been, a brain drain or skills drain of qualified skilled operations and tradesmen. It's been going on for about 15 years now as the baby boomers have been retiring, and fewer and fewer of the younger folks want to get into manufacturing. So, you know, the first thing...the obvious idea here is that you've got all these people from restaurants and retail stores and things that are dying to get some work, and that on the surface would look like good opportunity to maybe look at those folks to fill entry-level positions. So, help for non-manufacturing people get over their apprehension. That's the first thing I would say is that...so, you know, I happen to know a few people. You know, I go to restaurants and establishments where there are some of these hospitality-type workers. You know, in my region here, I live in what's called the Space Coast of Florida. It's a central east coast near Kennedy Space Center, Port Canaveral. A lot of activity going on here with the aerospace industry, and so I started getting involved with a lot of this stuff. And what I saw was a thing called the CPT, certified production technologist. It's a program that's in a lot of areas of the country, and it's really just introduces people into what it's like to work in manufacturing, and there's four pillars that they work through. There's a lot of grants out there for people to be able to participate in that certified production technician course. It's there, and it's available to people that are in that situation.
So, the first problem is a lot of these folks don't know about that program. The second problem is that I think that there's a lot of apprehension, right? So, people that are not familiar with being in a plant or a facility that does manufacturing, they have in their mind what they've seen in the movies and television shows, and they may not actually understand how a manufacturing plant is really, it's a modern place. Most places are modern, they're clean, there's a lot of automation and technology in them, and that a lot of the entry-level positions really aren't that difficult to get acclimated to and to get oriented to.
So, the first issue with a program such as CPT is that people don't know about it. The second one is that there's an apprehension for people to...they tend to fear the unknown, right? So, we have to be able to get them over that hump. And the third thing that may not be as obvious is that there's been a big push for increasing the minimum wage. So, if you couple the second and third of these items, the apprehension and the increasing of the minimum wage, it makes people less likely or less desiring to make that jump.
And so then you ask, well, what can you do to help people have less apprehension? My advice to a plant would be to hold open houses. You know, have a pizza night and have an open house and have a couple of your star operators and maintainers participate in that. Of course, pay those folks to participate, but have an open house: have them come in, have them see what's going on. Work with your local employment office or economic development council. Try to get people over that hump because, I think, once they see it, and they start seeing what the salaries are in manufacturing as compared to working at McDonald's, nothing wrong with working at McDonald's, but, you know, the salaries and the benefits are typically a lot better. That's what I see there.
Another thing I would say is, now I have a son that left, he was in the military. I'm a coast guard retired veteran, and my son went in for four years, and he came out, and he had some skills as being a machinery technician. And he got a couple of job interviews at a couple of places in my region here, and, he showed up for the interview at this one location, shows up for the interview. And then they had him waiting an extra 20, 30 minutes for the interviewers to show up. One of them shows up after 20 or 30 minutes and says, "Well, we don't have time to do it today. Come back tomorrow." So he did. He came back the next day, and the next day he shows up, and another person comes out for the interview. There were supposed to be two or three people during the interview, and the person that showed up to do the interview on day two wasn't even sure why he was doing the interview, what the position that he was interviewing for was, or anything like that. So in some cases, I think, we're our own worst enemy in that we don't put our best foot forward when we have somebody that is capable and shows up at our door.
And then, obviously, the other thing is you should make sure that you keep your facility in a condition that makes people want to work there, right? You should be clean, organized, safe, showing respect for the people that work there. I mean, anybody listening to this that would be somebody interested in bringing people in, I mean, I strongly recommend you go into places like Indeed and Glassdoor and look at what people are saying about your facility because that can make a big difference in attracting people as well.
Amanda: Yeah. So it seems like there's a little bit of almost manufacturers need to be selling themselves as much as the potential employee is selling themselves to the company, right?
Tom: Yeah, exactly. You know, another thing, Amanda, is that a couple of the companies around here, they actually pay their employees when they recruit somebody to come into a position, and there's kind of a scale to it. You know, if it's somebody with high skills and high experience, they get a little bit more. If it's an entry-level person, maybe it's a little bit less. But that way you're also engaging your whole workforce to be recruiters. That's another good thing to do, I think.
Amanda: Yeah. And, I think, word of mouth has always been one of the best means of getting things out there.
Tom: Yeah. Absolutely.
Amanda: And I've learned that you have taken more of a personal interest in this topic and now currently serve as SMRP's Government Relations Committee chairman. Can you tell us what led you to that position, and what kinds of conversations are happening between your committee and Capitol Hill?
Tom: Yeah. Great. I'd love to. Yes. So how did I get to this position? Well, I've been with SMRP, the Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals, since 2002 and was certified in 2003, and I've been actively engaged with them for years. I have kind of avoided or navigated around being a director or having an official position. But what happened was about a year ago, I started getting much more engaged in my local region here with the Economic Development Council. There was aerospace manufacturing workshop that was going on that,what's called CareerSource Florida, that's actually what you know of as being the employment office, but in Florida, they call it CareerSource. So they were hosting this workshop, and they went out and invited a bunch of people from industry, from the local community college, and some others that were interested like myself in trying to increase the skilled trades that were in this region. So as I was participating with that, I was doing some background research, and I came across a National Institute of Science and Technology survey that went out. And I hope the listeners had a chance to participate in that. It was called the Economics of Manufacturing Maintenance, and at the time, I knew Howard Penrose who was a past chair of the Society Maintenance & Reliability Professionals, and a guy named Rick Baldridge who works for Cargill. And Rick was the, at the time, he was the committee chair. So, I approached them, and I said, "Hey, I've come across this survey that I think SMRP should get involved with and broadcast it and see if we can get additional participation." And the study that came out of it it's on the NIST website. If you go there, you can download, and I highly encourage everybody to do that. There's some tons of great information in there, and it's specifically targeted towards medium and small-size manufacturing. There's some really great analysis that was done in there. You know, no good deed goes unpunished. So about two months after that, Rick called me up and said he was term limited as the SMRP Government Relations chair, and put my name forward to take over for him. That's kind of how I ended up as the chair.
Now, in terms of what we're doing on Capitol Hill. For a couple years now, we've been doing bi-annual fly-ins where maybe about 20 or 30 people from SMRP would go to Capitol Hill, and they would set meetings with various congressmen and senators. And the main push has always been to get the Perkins grant reauthorizations and to ensure that skilled trades were included in that. And, of course, SMRP is more about physical asset management, maintenance and reliability. So we wanted to push to make sure that those sorts of things were eligible for grant funding. When I came in, I kind of felt like that was an okay push. You know, certainly, we want to put our weight behind the Perkins grants and all that, but I also felt like we could do better. Around the U.S. and Canada, we have a series of chapters. In each of those chapters in various regions of the country, we've got people that are working for manufacturers or other organizations that are interested in making sure we have enough skilled tradesmen, and in particular, physical asset management, maintenance and reliability. So, my idea was, yeah, we can continue doing the Capitol Hill stuff, and we actually partnered with an organization called Business Leaders United, BLU, and they're much more experienced at doing lobbying on Capitol Hill. So we kind of partnered with them. But now we are kind of shifting gears a bit. We're still going to do that, but what we're doing now is we've got a pilot project that we just started with the Carolinas Chapter, where we are going to try to create a process or a procedure on how to engage locally with the education resources in that region, so whether it's the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, Economic Development Council, the CareerSource type folks, manufacturing associations. We're trying to partner with them, get onto the industry advisory councils in those regions that have input into the community colleges and the other education, the career, and technical education type folks so that we can leverage our local knowledge and local interest to try to get more traction. And once we do this in the Carolinas Chapter, we're going to try to send it over to all of the different SMRP chapters across the U.S. and Canada and try to get more traction locally because, truthfully, that's where it's needed.
That's kind of what we're doing there. And, you know, any of the listeners, if you're an SMRP member, great. If you're not, you know, I strongly encourage you to have people that are interested in workforce development, the CTE program, and all that sort of stuff to become SMRP members or have your organization, your company become a corporate member, and to participate in the Government Relations Committee. We've got actually three subcommittees. One is Workforce Development, one is Cyber Security, and one is Safety.
Amanda: Great. Thank you.
Now I know you also as I mentioned earlier write a leadership column for our Plant Services magazine, and you've conducted research into factors that influence plant morale and leadership success. I know some of those data are in your new book, "The Productive Leadership System." Could you talk about a few of your key findings, especially the kinds of quick wins that can strongly impact plant teams for the better?
Tom: Sure. And first, thank you very much for mentioning my book and my column and Plant Services. The Plant Services column I've been doing for over 11 years now. It's a monthly column. Whenever I mentioned this, I always tell people that are listening that, you know, feel free to contact me because, when you do 12 articles a year for 11 years, sometimes the well runs dry, and you want come up with some new thoughts or new ideas and help people deal with a specific problem. So, I'm hoping that this podcast you can include my email address and a couple of other links so that they can get in touch with me if they would like.
But, yeah, as far as the book's concerned, it took me about two years to write it and to get it published. And it's published by Industrial Press, and you can find it on Amazon or Industrial Press. And I wrote it because I saw that there was a gap, a leadership gap. As I mentioned, I was 24 years in the Coast Guard, retired in 2003. And when I started doing consulting work going into all sorts of different facilities and plants, I just noticed that there was a leadership gap. And when there's a leadership gap, it tends to propagate dissatisfied workers and programs and initiatives that, you know, they kick off with a lot of fanfare, and then they crash after a few months, and then it's like a program of the month thing. And so as I started really focusing on that and studying it and trying to figure out why that was, I came up with three different reasons for that. The first was I go into a lot of places, and there's just a lack of accountability. Different levels of leadership should own certain aspects of accountability, and so that's the first thing.
The second thing was the individual leadership capabilities of the individual persons. Now, I saw a study done by another group that they talked about that the average person that gets put into a supervisory position is about just under 30 years old in that the first time that most of them got leadership training was something like 9 years or 10 years after they assumed the position of being a supervisor. So, in essence, we're putting people into leadership positions and not training them for 10 years. We're just expecting them to know the finer points about how to be an effective leader. You know, we might send them to the Holiday Inn and give them time management and communication and empowerment training, but there's a lot more to leadership capability than just the small group of leadership skills. And so then that brought me to the third thing is that most organizations don't really have an effective leadership development program. There's not a program or a policy that describes how to bring in somebody at an entry-level and try to get them into a leadership position. Now, certainly, there's a lot of people that don't want a leadership position, but we should still as leaders want to develop them into their technical or their operational or their support function and get them trained up as experts in their field. But in terms of somebody being a leader, the consequences of not having good accountability leadership capability or leadership development program are those program of the month type scenarios, as well as in a lot of cases, disgruntled workers.
I actually just created a new online course as well that's an overview of productive leadership. They're there to try to help solve those problems. I would like to point out, too, that talking with Tom Wilk at Plant Services, we are going to relaunch the survey that we did in 2015.
So it's about six years ago when we did the original survey, and you asked about what were a couple of key findings. I guess the first one was that using the survey, I was able to put a measurement, a relative value on levels of motivation. And what it showed for supervisors, managers, and senior managers is that the more frequently they were provided with leadership training, the higher their motivation scores were. It was very impressive to see that. Another thing that kind of struck me is that in a part of the survey where we asked supervisors and team members about 20 different questions about how they felt about how effective the team was. The interesting thing that came out was that the top three and bottom three of the two different groups, the supervisors versus the team members, two out of the three were exactly opposite. So if you're a supervisor and you were to do this same exercise and answer the 20 questions yourself and then give the same 20 questions to your direct reports to the, you know, your work center personnel, and you compare the two answers and the top three that you felt were the bottom three on how your team felt, that would be some pretty startling information that would be a wake-up call for you, "Maybe I need to rethink this. You know, maybe I need to address these things that are scoring low for these guys because, I think, I'm doing great with it."
So, as far as quick wins, I would say I put a lot of the things that you would consider quick wins into the book, but within the book, it's within the case that it's with the larger understanding of how the productive leadership system works and how this other thing I call the organizational reliability model works. And organizational reliability is how you assign accountability, and productive leadership is leadership capability, right? So, the first thing I would say is that managers need to focus on providing direction, guidance and assets. So, people need clarity and stability to enable performance. So, look for problems and guidance that create ambiguities gaps and overlaps, right? So, if you have a process or a procedure where two different work centers, maybe operations and maintenance, are involved with it, are there ambiguities, gaps, or overlaps in any of those documents, so any of that guidance? Because that's where conflict happens. That's where you get non-teamwork, right? Ambiguities simply means that something is not covered, or it's not clear what we want, what we're talking about. Gaps mean that it's not covered that there's an aspect that we haven't dealt with in the guidance, and overlap is kind of an odd one. But I've seen this a couple of times where two different sets of documents or pieces of guidance tell two different groups that they are accountable to do something. So now you have two groups that are arguing about whose responsibility it is. So, those sorts of things create conflict.
Leaders need to execute current guidance with current assets, right? So, they also need to notify their senior people when they don't have the guidance or assets that they need. So, along those lines, a few things that would be quick wins I would say, the first thing is to keep accountability for guidance and assets for those decisions. We want to keep the accountability on the senior person. So if you're a shop supervisor, and you're reporting to a manager, there are times when the manager is just not responsive. So you're saying, "Hey, I need this, or you're asking me to do all these tasks, and I don't have the number of people I need to do all these tasks." And you tell him about it, and you never get feedback, they never give you direction. Well, one of the quick wins I would say is to use the phrase “unless otherwise directed,” right? So if I'm that supervisor, and I've got 10 tasks to do, I'm going to select the eight tasks that I know I can get done and the ones that, I think, are the most important ones. And if my boss is not going to respond to me, I'm going to keep the accountability on them by saying, "Unless otherwise directed, I'm going to do these eight, and I'm not going to do these two." That boss is either going to come back to you and say, "Oh, no, no, you're going to do this or that." They're going to give you direction, and if they don't come back and give you direction, well, you've told them what you're going to do. By their silence, they're still accepting accountability for it.
Another thing is to learn and practice leadership attributes. And like I said earlier, there's a lot more to productive leadership than just leadership skills like time management, communication and so forth. There are attributes or specific things about each leader. They have to want to be a leader. They should have a personal mission, vision, values and objectives that align with where they are currently and what are the positions they want to go to later. They should have leadership roles, leadership attributes and leadership skills. And leadership roles are basically where you allocate your time. Leadership skills we already talked about a little bit, but leadership attributes are the way that you interact with other people. And I use the acronym CARMA, spelled with a C, C-A-R-M-A, and that stands for consistent, attentive, respectful, motivational and assertive. So, if you can think about those words and use those as how you interact with other people, that would be something that you can learn and do in a fairly short period of time.
Another quick win. Two of the most important questions that a leader needs to know and ask. The first one is what needs to be done, and the second one is how are you going to do it. So, basically, you're not dictating to that junior person what are they going to do and how they're going to do it. You're asking them to tell you. And so once it sounds reasonable, tell them to go do it. Don't micromanage it.
Learn your sources of power. This is another one that is often not taught in leadership training. So there's two bases of power. There's personal power and position power. And position power is really the power that you have based on your title or your position description. It's legitimate authority that you have to kind of induce people to do things. You can have reward power to encourage them to do the right things in a positive way, and you have correction or coercive power for putting the hammer down when you need to. And there's personal power, and personal power is basically how you treat other people, and that's power that's given to you by everybody else, right? So, the idea here is that you need to understand your position and personal power bases, and generally speaking, you should be using personal power much more than position power. But if you need to use position power, then you use it. So there's another thing. I call it a virtuous cycle. If you get the right balance between personal and position power, then you can increase the amount of power that you have. And the opposite is true too. If you use too much position power, you're being too coercive, too negative, you will lose personal power. So your overall level of power drops. So, that would be another thing, right, to learn and understand your sources of power. When you need to correct somebody's behavior, understand that you're not correcting that person's behavior because that person is not complying. What you're really doing is correcting that person to support everybody else who is complying. And then, you know, a couple little things. You always chastise or correct people in private, and you praise them in public. And, you know, always give more positive feedback. I don't know anybody that gives too much positive feedback, but I know a lot of people that don't give enough positive feedback. That's what I would say about quick wins.
Amanda: There's some great information there just on the basics of being a good leader and definitely some things I think people can take home and maybe apply right away.
Well, moving on a little bit, you know, if there's one thing we saw in 2020, it was the power of technology and newer industry workers being introduced to digital work and systems before moving on to more hands-free roles. How do you see the Internet and technology playing a role in the manufacturing, hiring processes? How can these tools be used in other ways to improve a manufacturer's reach for new employees?
Tom: Yeah. Great question. So, one of the first things that I'd say is just recently in the past couple of months, I've been working with a client. I was hesitant to do this, but they asked to do failure modes and effects analysis on some of their production equipment, but they wanted to do it remotely. They said if absolutely necessary, they would let me fly out there and come into the plant, but they really wanted to not have anybody in the plant that didn't work there. So I said, "Okay. Well, let's give it a try." And so, you know, we started doing it, and there are ways that we use like a Dropbox as a way to put all the documents up. We've had a bunch of Zoom meetings. Actually, we're using Teams but using those meetings to sit down with subject matter experts, and we're not doing it like normally if you're doing FMEAs or RCM in a plant or root cause analysis or something. You'd have a team sitting in a conference room, and you'd be going through everything, and you might have, you know, two, three, four days of everybody in the same room. In this case, we're doing things remotely. So it's a little bit more tenuous in that if I need some subject matter expert input, I have to plan to meet with that person. It might be two days later. So, things get slowed down a bit, but we're still able to do it. So in this case, they were actually able to use a thing called XpertEye, which is one of these Google Glass kind of things where they can walk through the plant and actually show me how something was operating. So there's technologies like that that, I think, are gonna get more and more mainstream. There's a few, you know, takes a little getting used to. There's places where I wanted to see under a motor or the framework underneath the motor, and he couldn't get his head down there. There's some drawbacks.
I would also say that I'm affiliated with a company called Augmenter, and they have this great tool where they can use a remote expert, right? So basically, you can create processes or procedures, checklists, whatever for either operations or product assembly or maintenance, and they can put down based on whether somebody is a new person in the plant versus whether they're an experienced person. There's two different sets of information that would go to that individual. So it's tailored to their expertise basically. And there's a remote expert where if I'm on site, let's say I'm in an oil refinery or something, and I'm out in the North 40, and I have a problem, well, I can use my smartphone and just communicate with an expert that is remote from there to be able to look at those things, rapid authoring, right? You can draft up processes or procedures or modify them pretty quickly. You can embed videos and obviously PDFs and things like that. It’s great for collecting data. Depending on how granular you wanted to make the data, you could have the checklist sort of a thing where you can now look at how effective the training has been and how are there people that are taking longer on certain steps. So it's kind of an AI capability built into it so that if you have multiple people doing the same task, you can identify which ones are taking longer on which steps, and that might help you to target training to increase their effectiveness. And so those sorts of things, I think, are going to be helpful.
As it relates to the skills gap and trying to fill positions, the more we can get people the right support and the more productive we can make them, then the easier it is to deal with, you know, fewer headcount or smaller headcount. You know, we're in an exciting time now with all of the technology that's available. I always wonder also though about cybersecurity and how organizations will allow solutions to be used in the plant. That's kind of something that we have to keep an eye on and something that we need to be able to overcome.
Amanda: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, not just in technology, but just in general, the pandemic has changed so many aspects of our lives at home and at work. What kind of COVID-related workforce challenges do you think could be permanently installed to make a workplace seem safer to its employees if any at all?
Tom: I'm going to say none. My thing is really, I'm an optimist as far as this stuff is concerned. You know, if you think back to the Spanish flu in 1918, it wasn't long after the flu subsided that everybody was kind of back to normal, and, I think, we're still a good six months away from that because it's going to take a while for all of the vaccines to get out there and for people to start relaxing and getting back to things. But I really don't want these to be permanent changes. You know, I want to shake hands with people. I want to hug people. I want to be in close proximity to them. I want to go to sporting events and all those sorts of things. So, I mean, you know, certainly, we want people to practice good hygiene and those sorts of things, washing hands and all that. But, you know, when you think about it, the people who are most severely affected are people that had pre-existing conditions. You know, certainly, there's stories of people that were perfectly healthy but still succumb to the virus, but the vast majority had pre-existing respiratory and immune system problems. Maybe what we would look for is for companies and individuals to promote healthy lifestyles and, you know, stuff like losing weight and exercising, taking vitamins. Some positions that were predominantly administrative, they may still stay as remote positions because, at the end of the day, money is money, right? So if a company thinks that they can get away with less administrative space in their admin building, probably they'll allow that to continue. I think business travel is going to go down some because, I think, we've gotten a lot more comfortable with using Zoom and Teams and GoToMeeting and whatnot. There's still a lot of value in face-to-face interactions, and so that's just my personal feeling. I think I don't want to see a lot of changes that are permanent. So, that's what I'd say about that.
Amanda: I think we all kind of feel the same way, right? We're ready for our normal to come back, and I'm sure that plants are ready to have a full floor of staff...
Tom: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Amanda: ...really be churning out product, but we will see. The future is still, you know, a little bit of a mystery at this point.
Tom: Yeah. You know, the other thing too is, yeah, maybe there's fewer people in the plant because some places might go to additional automation and whatnot, but there still has to be people to program the automation. There still has to be people to work on it and when there's an upset, still have to have people go out and fix it, right?
Amanda: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Tom, thank you again so much for taking the time to speak with us today and share some of these insights, and hopefully, we'll have you on again sometime soon to chat about some other workforce or leadership issues.
Tom: Absolutely. I appreciate that, and what I'd say to your listeners is that with my, if it's okay, with my online course, it's in Beta version. I'm offering it to the first 100 people that sign up for 150 bucks. So, I'll give you the information for that. So if any of the listeners wanna take part in that, I'm happy to have them participate.
Amanda: Absolutely. And we'll be sure to include that in the podcast description. We can add some information on that there.
Tom: Fantastic.
Amanda: Oh, great. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.
Tom: You too, Amanda, and everybody have a great 2021.
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