How To Hook Gen Z On Manufacturing

As a small manufacturer in Louisville, Kentucky, Winston Industries has to compete for workers with giant, long-established local manufacturers including GE Appliance and the Ford pickup truck plant. So Winston CEO Shaun Tanner is doing his best to recruit and retain employees by tailoring his workplace to the needs and peculiarities of younger employees.

“I did a bunch of research on my own, and discovered that the U.S. workforce peaked in 2019, and it’s going to keep aging down until 2031,” says Tanner, a long-time Winston manager who in 2020 became head of the maker of commercial ovens, holding cabinets and other foodservice equipment as well as electronic devices. “It’s not going to get better; it’s going to get worse and worse. Retirees are leaving, and we have to fill the jobs with millennials and Generation Z. That’s just the reality.”

Winston employs about 250 people, and while Tanner says the average quit rate in national manufacturing is about two percent a year, he’s managed to nudge his company’s quit rate down to just 0.6 percent over the last year. Here are four things Tanner has emphasized to get that kind of result:

Lead with technology. It’s one thing to automate jobs in factory processes, but Tanner also has emphasized computerizing job training as well. Winston is integrating AI with digital workstations to create a dynamic and engaging work environment, making it easier to train employees and rotate them across different role to keep them motivated.

“Leveraging technology like this is a huge foundation,” Tanner says. “It used to be you’d have someone who was 50 years old and been here 20 years and teaching a younger worker how to do the job, and there was friction. So we’re making training easier so the older generation doesn’t have to hold someone’s hand. They hear it from a computer that’s process-based.”

Make recruiting relevant. For Winston, a big part of that switch was simply in how it describes job openings. “We stopped simply posting job descriptions and started marketing jobs to younger generations,” Tanner says. “Every job description we began making like we were marketing to a customer in the B2C world. We changed the vernacular we chose.

“We began using ‘buyer-persona’ logic: We did postings that sounded funny, that looked like an advertisement. We were unapologetic about ourselves and talked with people, not at them.”

Results: “We were getting maybe five responses to job postings, but this process took it up to maybe 50 responses. Not only did we have different bait, we got more fish interested. And the people we got were actually more in tune to what we were as an organization.”

Develop relationships. Tanner is the first person outside the family founders to run the company, and he has embraced the challenge of continuing to provide a family-run feel to Winston. “I’m on a first-name basis with about 220 of our employees,” he says. “I want treat people like people and let them be their unique selves and don’t treat them like a number. That’s where we have an edge over GE: They’re just too big to do that.”

Tanner knows one employees, for example, who’s a big fan of IPA beer. “When you understand people, everyone wants to be part of that. It really hits home with Gen Z.”

Provide flexibility. About 50 white-collar workers have some flexibility in how much time they spend in the office. “We can’t do [remote] full-time because I know people aren’t as productive working from home,” Tanner says. “Most people in our workforce, depending on their positions and desires, we give a choice of four ten-hour days or five eight-hour days. If they want to work remotely and on a four-day work week, they can work remotely one day; if they work five days a week, they can work remotely two days a week. And they can switch days with full flexibility.

“The only thing we try to ensure is that, along with flexibility, they need to hit the deliverables. We’re not there to micromanage people. Just get the job done.”