The needs of the high-volume manufacturing sector are rapidly changing, particularly in highly regulated industries. If you are in a leadership role in one of these industries, you need solution providers who can respond quickly to your requirements to ensure you remain competitive while also maintaining accuracy, quality, and compliance.
This requires a new approach to talent management, something which is especially important for service providers delivering Industry 4.0 solutions where the pace of change, scale of risk, and size of opportunity are all significant.
For us at SL Controls, we have adopted an agile approach to talent management to respond to the changing needs of clients, react to market conditions, manage the evolving requirements of regulators, and more.
The Agile Approach to Talent Management
We are a tech company, so we have extensive experience in the agile approach to developing software and technology solutions.
While you can’t export the entire tech agile approach to the talent management function of a business, you can adopt the same principles.
The goal is to strip away restrictive, bureaucratic, and rules-based processes, replacing them with simpler, faster, and more flexible models capable of responding to change.
This makes it possible to deal with rapidly evolving client needs, even at short notice.
Transforming Talent Management
The top-down, climbing-the-corporate-ladder approach has long been consigned to the history books, particularly in modern and rapidly growing companies. Only now, however, are we seeing a truly transformative approach to talent management in sectors like manufacturing where talent-related principles and processes are changing.
SL Controls is at the forefront of these changes in our industry and our field of equipment systems integration.
Our talent management function is comprehensive and detailed. Still, there are some significant differences we can highlight between the agile approach we have adopted and the more traditional way of managing a team.
Mix of Both Employees and Contractors
At SL Controls, we believe the right approach to delivering client expectations is to use both employees and contractors. This gives us stability and an in-house core of skilled and knowledgeable people while also enabling us to respond rapidly to client requests, even at short notice.
Focus on Teams Rather than Individuals for Project Delivery
A good analogy here is a scrum in rugby, where eight players interlink and move as one towards the same goal. Even if one drops out, the seven remaining can continue to drive forward, or a replacement can be slotted in.
Our approach to delivering projects follows a similar principle, where a tight-knit team of employees and contractors works together towards delivering on the client’s objectives. Rather than an approach where individuals perform individual tasks to make up the whole, the focus remains on the team.
Continuous Development of a Company-Wide Learning Culture
Industry experience can only deliver maximum benefits when the knowledge learned from those experiences is disseminated throughout the organisation. At SL Controls, we have well-established processes to ensure knowledge and information is available across teams and business units.
Enabling Multiple Career Path Opportunities
We embrace and nurture multiple career path opportunities based on the needs of the business instead of taking a linear approach to career progression. This ensures greater fulfilment for members of the team and helps everyone reach their full potential.
Furthermore, linking the process with the needs of the business ensures we constantly meet the needs of our clients, even as those needs evolve.
Continuous, Customised, and Multidirectional Feedback
Continuous, constructive feedback from supervisors, team leaders, peers, and managers at all levels enhances quality as well as the accuracy and speed of project delivery. It is a much more flexible and effective method of providing feedback than the traditional annual appraisal model.
Delivering for Clients
There are a number of benefits that an agile approach to talent management will bring to your business. They include:
- Availability of specialist engineers in multiple disciplines
- Those specialist engineers integrated with your team
- Vendor-neutral approach to project delivery
- Long/short term placement solutions available
- Structured management process
- In house technical support team
- Fast deployment of resourcing options
Industry 4.0 technologies and processes are transforming the manufacturing sector and will, in the near future, lead to disrupted business models. Our agile approach to talent management will help you navigate through these changes, providing you with the skills, resources, and project delivery expertise that you require.
