Industry 4.0 Tip: For Victory Engage Unions
This article was first published on SmarterChains’ blog.
What does your manufacturing company need to stay competitive in today’s highly volatile, customer-centric market? Smarter technologies, to be sure, and a brand-new business paradigm: one that’s more flexible, more productive and more personalized. Much has already been written about Industry 4.0 adoption, change management, and cultural transformation, but there’s a surprising gap in literature:
How to engage worker unions for digital success.
In our experience, worker unions are a key stakeholder in most things related to manufacturing. As such, any executive that aims to champion digital transformation efforts would do well to engage them smartly. This paper explains why and how to do that.
Start with “Why”
As a general trend, the larger the company, the more positive its disposition towards Industry 4.0. And the more positive the company, the more cautious the union. Considering the speed by which skills (or the nature of work itself) change as the fourth industrial era continues to unfold, a healthy dose of cautiousness is natural.
Many important questions arise: Which jobs are threatened? How will manufacturing processes change? How will the working environment change? Headcount reductions? Privacy? In short, is there a dark side to Industry 4.0 — and if so, what can we do about it?
These are very sensible questions. It’s clear that Industry 4.0 transforms labor in manufacturing. The need to coordinate the virtual and the physical will raise the skill floor and place higher demands on workers, increasing a job’s complexity and abstraction. In addition, there’s also the danger of polarizing the workforce between the new and highly-skilled digital natives, and the functional, analog employees.
To address these concerns, there’s a need for serious social dialogue between companies and unions. According to the European Commission’s Science and Knowledge Service [I], social dialogue may:
• Resolve conflicts of interest in employment.
• Safeguard labor so that it doesn’t become a commodity.
• Ensure employee representation and a due process in dispute resolution.
In other words, when you factor in the union’s POV, you understand your workforce’s pain points better. When you understand those pain points, you’re in the perfect position to formulate win-win solutions that not only benefit your staff (e.g digital training programs) but also secure buy-in to more effective Industry 4.0 adoption.
Dare to Do the “How”
The path to positive union engagement branches out in two ways: one long, one short. The longer path is to broadcast Industry 4.0 awareness programs to the wider community, leveraging universities, industry associations, conferences, and other public channels to slowly slide general opinion — and consequently, the union’s opinion — in favor of digitization in manufacturing. Key topics to cover include: on-the-job skills development, the integration of job roles and functions, the need for innovation, lifelong learning, continuous re-skilling, new business models and more. This effort should be orchestrated strategically, with a multi-year horizon and on a company-wide level.
The shorter path is to book a virtual factory assessment with SmarterChains’ — and invite the union representatives in the meeting. Our remote, fast and productive diagnosis (assessment) and prescription (roadmap creation) process is an excellent demonstration of what the future of manufacturing will look like, and a great point of reference to align your internal leadership with external stakeholders. Moreover, SmarterChains’ Factory of the Future consultants will be more than happy to address any concerns the union’s representatives may have, both on the technology and organizational level of digital transformation.
If you represent a worker union, feel free to contact SmarterChains’ directly for inquiries.
