The Future of Factory Work: Skills-Based Flexible Scheduling

Ed Ballina
So Rahil welcome, welcome. Alvaro did a brief intro for you. And tell you what, we are thrilled to have you.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, great to have you on board and Ari the same. Great to have you with us today. We really thank you both coming in. As I was telling guys, we are fortunate to have these two complement perspectives. So let’s start with Rahil. He’s computer science, also a master in industry and labor relations.

12 years experience in all kinds of HR roles; quit his job, now founder of Wilya. And  he said, “I quit to build the tools you wished you had.” So,  and with that, tell us a little bit more about that, Rahil.

Rahil Siddiqui
Absolutely. Great to be here. Thank you. I  think you did a really good job of giving a concise background  on myself. I started off as a computer science engineer who moved into the world of HR, did  over a decade of  HR in and around factory floors, and  had a bit of a eureka moment  right after the pandemic. Lockdowns were lifted as we were all starting to go back to our in-person jobs.

Of course, the factory frontline folks were already working  in person.  But as some of the others started going back, had this moment of, we’re talking about flexibility in terms of working in person, working from home, working some kind of hybrid. And that’s where I had to sort of take a step back and think about it. What does flexibility look like for those frontline folks, those essential workers? And it was all sort of precipitated by reading one line in one CNN article, which kind of was talking about how millions of women were expected to leave the workforce due to a lack of flexibility in their jobs. And that hits me like a brick in the face. And I get obsessed with this idea of, how do we figure out flexibility? What does flexibility look like for frontline labor in our factories and warehouses?  And so, yeah, for the last few years, we’ve been sort of scratching away and clawing away at that  idea. We’ve got a few  hypotheses and a few constructs that I’m very excited to talk  about with all of you.

Ed Ballina
That’s awesome. was trying to describe your concept ⁓ to my son, who’s also my general manager, and I said, think about Uber, but for work. And he was like, ⁓ So I’m not going to take your thunder away, that’s how I just mentally, you know, I log your conversations. Very interesting. So now let me jump over to  say hello to Ari. So.

Ari and I  shared some contact in our previous lives and I was thrilled to see her as part of this  podcast today because she brings the consumer or the customer perspective. Think about what Rahil is talking about as a  solution and Ari is the consumer that has the problem that he’s trying to solve with flexibility and all that.

And with her background in shop floor operating environments, she brings a wealth of knowledge  and experiences. So Ari, welcome. So great to see you again and reconnect.

Arianna Flores
Yeah, it’s great to be here.

Ed Ballina
Fantastic. Tell us a little bit about your career journey.

Arianna Flores
Yeah, so I worked for a top industry beverage producer. And I worked for about six years in the manufacturing environment across different avenues of titles from maintenance supervisor, process improvement engineer. And then my final role with manufacturing was maintenance and engineering manager, which was very taxing.  One of the reasons that I ended up leaving my career there, even though I had a very aggressive projection.  I learned through just the nature of the business and what we needed to do in order to get things done to make production run is I didn’t really have that work life balance. I had you know, personal things to me. I didn’t have flexibility for some of my health issues that were coming up and you know, as Rahil said, as a woman in the workplace, you know, I’m thinking about having a family soon. I got married in August. Thank you. Um, so those were things that I was fearful of, you know, working, you know, 60 hour weeks. Um, would I actually have that flexibility? Could I be present? Um, and so that’s kind of a little bit about my background and how I ended up here with the Augury team, uh, working on the opposing side as before working with manufacturing.

Ed Ballina
It’s always interesting to make those career changes that  flip you in terms of being the customer to being the supplier. Because now you get to walk a mile in somebody else’s moccasins and it’s an interesting perspective to have for sure. Welcome.

Alvaro Cuba
And it’s great to have that perspective in the show right now and  someone that really lived it and had to make tough decisions because of that. Rahil, you mentioned  your a-ha moment when you were seeing that the desk workers were talking about flexibility, but the essential workers couldn’t.

And you said in those four or five years that you are on this, you are trying to figure out flexibility. So what have you learned? What does actually flexibility means for a machine operator or a mechanical  technician?

Rahil Siddiqui
Absolutely. So  let me go back to something Ed said earlier about  his son’s immediate visceral reaction about Uber for factory work. That’s a horrible idea. Ed was editorializing it, right? So we can cut to the chase there. It’s a bad idea. The best case scenario, somebody gets hurt. Worst case scenario, the place blows up, right? So no, that’s not what we’re talking about. So let’s get that out of the way.

Now, what are we talking about? So let’s start defining flexibility then, Alvaro. So in the last few years, we’ve looked at this many different ways. We’ve been talking to dozens, if not hundreds of factories. And so a very sort of  oversimplified synthesis of how we can think about flexibility can come down to three things, right? As a frontline deskless worker, do I have the ability to influence.

So when do I work? How much do I work? And what do I work on? We’ve imagined some of this. We’ve had some discussions around at least some elements of this. But as we keep talking a little bit more, we can sort of double click under each one of those. Or I’m happy to dig into any one if you’re curious.

Ed Ballina
That sounds like a really great  equation, right?  For people that perhaps are not quite as  comfortable with traditional work roles,  it really is an answer. One thing that we have seen is a transition to more people choosing to be part of a gig economy, right? And that means you need a lot of flexibility, but how do you get that? And you provide a great vehicle for that.

Alvaro Cuba
I’m curious about  Ari, why don’t you give us your perspective on that flexibility based on your reality? What really flexibility meant to you or the lack of flexibility?

Arianna Flores
Yeah, of course. Thank you, Alvaro. I mean, from my perspective, you know, flexibility is kind of what I alluded to is that work-life balance that I wasn’t able to achieve. It’s the ability to go to family events, to go to your kids’ basketball game, to, you know, help a loved one out, to have a personal life,  to be able to pick your kid up from school without work progression blocks.

You know, we talk about this culture that we’re trying to create, but it also isn’t a norm yet in the industry. So, you know, for example, you know, I had a maintenance supervisor that I granted an early out for every Thursday because he wanted to make sure his daughter got home safe from school. And it was a five mile walk and he wanted to make sure he was there to pick her up. And it was about 2 PM. You know, he worked five tens, 10 to 12s  to five days a week doing that.

And he would come in at 3am and he would leave right at the dot on 1pm so that he could go and be there for his daughter. But this ended up bring a perception and perspective shift from the leadership group that were trying to assign leadership opportunities as “he doesn’t have the work ethic” because he’s not here all the time for like, you know, a machine went down and he had to leave and he had to leave right on the dot for his daughter. But it’s those things that you can’t really achieve right now just because of the norm of the industry and where that could potentially block you. And I saw some similar things with myself, with my peers thinking lesser of me, because I was able to work from home a couple of days a week because I had, you know, medical things.  So that’s kind of the perspective that I look at, but from Rahil’s point too, for operator teams, flexibility is that, I could put up half my shift and  then I can go get this errand done or I can go to an appointment or something of that sort. And for, you know, operators and,  you know, your warehouse workers, that is a reality that can be achieved if people could put the infrastructure in place, but maybe a little bit less so for some of the mechanics that I,  had underneath because it’s technical, technical abilities, right? That’s just a little bit of an issue on top of, you know, is staffing those technical roles for controls, PLC logic, stuff like that.

Rahil Siddiqui
That sentiment that Ari just articulated, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve come across that. We have been trained for decades in this industry to automatically equate the quantity of work that we do to the quality of that work product, right? And they may or may not have any relevance.

I mean, if anything, there may be from an EH&S standpoint, there may be some evidence that shorter bursts of time, you may be more productive in the first half of that shift or the first half of that extended period of time, right? So that quantity and quality  of output, that’s something to think about. And from a point of empathy, let’s not forget that we are being judged here a little bit harshly by folks who came up the…the ladder working their butts off, right? So their instinctive reaction is, what do you mean you can’t work eight hours a day or 10 hours a day and five days a week, right? I did that. That’s how I got to where I am. So this is going to take time, we’re in a period of flux, but thank you, Ari, that’s,  articulates that very, very well what I’ve been experiencing.

Ed Ballina
Yeah, I mean that is such an on spot point. And Ari, the other point you had brought up when we spoke previously is also this sense of predictability, right? And many of our manufacturing locations, know, Alvaro and I joked that it’s Hotel California. You can check in, but you don’t know when you’re checking out, right? You come in at 8 o’clock in the morning and things break. And Ari, you’re smiling, so I think you may have something to share with us there.

Right? How do you have a predictable schedule with your family when you’re not predictable at work, right? Some of us can manage that, others, it’s impossible.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, well, thank you, Ari, for  sharing with us openly your experience and what you have seen. And I think we all relate to that. We experience it and  at some points we also enforce it. So we are all part of the issue, but I think we all should be part of the solution as well.

That’s why we are here. Rahil, Ari described several pain points in this and Ed mentioned the gig economy. What are the companies missing or what is the cost for those companies to not think about part-time options or other options behind all this?

Rahil Siddiqui
Thank you Alvaro, I think you hit the nail on the head there. Firstly, let’s just  address the elephant in the room. Flexible work or gig economy like work will not replace full-time jobs, right? That is not what we are talking about. We’re not going to flick a switch and suddenly all factories or some of our factories turn into a completely gig labor model.

That is not what we’re talking about. And I think Alvaro, you framed the question really well. Yes, we cannot do gig work for factories, but can we afford to ignore this bigger and bigger part of the population out there that is actively looking for gig-like work or gig-like flexibility in their schedules, right? Or part-time options.

There may be some generational trends there, but frankly, I’ve also seen folks who are closer to retirement or post retirement want to come back and take up a few hours here and there. So what is the cost? You’re locking out of employment a pretty big chunk of the community in which you operate who is willing to work. They may be very capable, qualified folks. The other side of this coin that  we discovered, quite by accident, when some of our early customers started looking for part-time, flexible workers who could supplement their existing full-time workforce, we started seeing, demographically very interesting, it was middle-aged white men in middle America who started showing up to these types of job advertisements. And so we took it upon ourselves to dig down and understand, hey, hang on, like we knew women need flexibility. We know sort of, know, post-retirement, flexible work options, et cetera. What’s going on with y’all? Why do you need flexibility? And we started hearing some of the most interesting stories. Hey, I’ve got a full-time job elsewhere. I just need a few extra hours here and there. I don’t want an entire second job that I want to commit to.

I have to buy a boat next year. I’m expecting a baby next year. I’m buying a house next year. And so there’s this entire latent labor capacity in the communities where we operate, which we are not able to tap into. So those are the costs, right? Those are the opportunity costs that we’re leaving.

Ed Ballina
Yeah, we’ve seen  little  glimpses of that. I think we had discussed that we try to find a way to employ teachers during the summer, which is typically a high vacation period for us. But some of the work didn’t line up with their skill sets. But it was that similar idea. So Ari, what’s your quick reaction to that cost calculation that you just heard? Does that make sense to you based on what you saw?

Arianna Flores
I think it does make sense.  I think it will just depend on, to your point, having teachers be a part of that, like if you look at a skills matrix of what each role you have to be certified in or have a basic knowledge of, I think it will land differently. And it’s just dependent on those things.

Ed Ballina
Great point about skill matrix. I think we’re going to talk a little bit about that further on. But especially in manufacturing supply chain, you can’t just throw people at this, right?  In many cases, very specialized manufacturing skills. And I’m not even talking about maintenance and engineering. So, Alvaro.

Alvaro Cuba
So yeah, moving ahead,  let’s talk a little bit about, you said flexibility and skills, trade, foundation. So Rahil, you described this framework of when do I work, how much do I work, and what do I work on?  And we also discussed how difficult it is to change history and to change the norms that are there. So what is the hardest cultural shift in the traditional manufacturing to move and accept these new ideas?

Rahil Siddiqui
Yeah, so I don’t know if I would say there’s one answer to that question, Alvaro. it comes down to each specific factory floor and their own sort of nuances and history and cultures, right? So let’s take one example each quickly. I’ve seen some very typical factories that you wouldn’t really think of as being the most progressive or anything, but they have a fantastic summer hours program, right? And so they offer their long standing employees, kids who are back from college or in high school to come and pick up a few shifts here and there during summers, because they need backup for vacations that have been planned for them, right?

So the when do I work and how much do I work is kind of addressed in there in that instance. So sometimes all we need to do is sort of invoke the right vocabulary of, you’ve kind of done this. I’ll take another example. If we go back to the 70s and 80s in this country in manufacturing, we used to have something called job sharing. Ed and Alvaro used to be one job share pair. Maybe Ari and Rahil were one job share pair, right? Now, back in the day, this was all being managed in somebody’s head or on a piece of paper, and we couldn’t get too cute by intermingling these people, right? Somebody’s head would blow up. Spoiler alert, we have the technology to do that now, right? And that’s literally what Wilya does. So we kind of,  we joke about it sometimes, it’s sort of back to the future where we can bring job sharing, right, back on steroids. So a little bit of that.

And then the last piece of the what do I work on? We’ve done lip service to this, which is cross-skilling and cross-training. We’ve been maintaining this data on Excel sheets. Who has certifications on what machines or who is qualified to run what machines or maintain specific machines, et cetera. Now, some of the worst examples of this that I’ve encountered, we’ve paid people for skill but the work output they’re delivering, we’re not really using them across the board. So how do we cross deploy people? So that’s the, what do I work on? Can I influence that? Can those choices be influenced real time in an agile way? So that’s sort of what it comes down to from a culture standpoint in each different factory.

Ed Ballina
So we kind of served up this question of skills  a few minutes ago.  Tell us, why is it so important to have these granular skills that you’re talking about? We have some sheets where we mark stuff down for people. And especially in jobs that require unique skills like paper making  or a beverage line mechanic.

Rahil Siddiqui
Yeah, absolutely.  I think Ari spent enough time on the factory floor to know  you gotta have the right person with the right skill deployed to the right job. Now, for a supervisor or a maintenance manager like Ari, it’s intuitive. When she’s thinking about her labor,  she’s thinking about it in terms of who can perform what task or who is certified to do what task, right? And in her head is this sort of de facto skills matrix. Now let’s bring that from a tech stack and a tooling standpoint, right? What currently exists in most factory floors. When we think of a skills matrix, it’s usually sitting in Excel sheets. And then when we think about what  your typical HR toolkit sets out there, it’s some timekeeping systems.

You may have some attendance tracking, you may have a payroll system. Each of these systems are equipped to break people down to the department or a job code, right? So if we take a very simple example of a warehouse, you’re looking at a warehouse associate three or a senior warehouse associate and so on. Whereas a supervisor in a warehouse thinks about their people as somebody who can do picking and packing and use that forklift.

It’s skills. So the thesis that we’ve been able to sort of formalize over the last few years is for labor to truly be agile and for leadership to be able to deploy people in bite-sized chunks, right? Flexibly. Be able to make that flexibility go both ways. It has to be built. These things have to be built on a foundation of a granular skills matrix. So the good news is we’ve done this historically.

We’ve always done this. And now it’s a matter of just digitizing it. A really good simple analogy. Yeah, it’s the simple analogy is when you land in San Diego and order an Uber with your six month old baby, you’re looking for an Uber with a car seat. You can now indicate that on Uber, right? So think of what you’re able to do when you can truly deploy people with the right skill at the right time in all those “oh, snap!” moments.

Alvaro Cuba
putting some support behind it. Yeah.

Ed Ballina
See, I said Uber. I said Uber before.

Alvaro Cuba
I you. That’s exactly what I was going to say. You came back all around. That’s fun.

Ed Ballina
But you know, one thing that Ari would bring to the party, she, and this is the beauty of the skills work, right? I can look at a sheet that says, this person’s qualified on these four machines. Ari may know she has a problem on that packer because they’re waiting for parts. And if I put Ed over there, like he’s capable of running it when it’s running okay. But Alvaro knows how to run it with all the tricks in the trade. So I’m gonna put Alvaro over there because Ed might be able to lump through, Alvaro can keep it running even though it’s in bad shape. That’s the secret sauce that I’m sure you guys are capturing.

Rahil Siddiqui
Absolutely, the way you guys have historically done this on the factory floor is you’re doing like one, two, three or like the circular wheel, right? So that’s precisely right.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, but without the flexibility.

Well, actually Ari have implemented cross training matrix and she has some experience about it. So Ari, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you use that for flexibility and to advance career paths.

Arianna Flores
Yeah. And I’m not going to take full credit for that because that was definitely established in the culture of the plant that I joined. But  I appreciate that because it was a very successful way to look at things when you think of career progression. And a lot of the times you keep people with necessary career progression. So one of the things that we did with our cross-training matrix at the site was having operators cross-train on different production lines.

So we had two bottle lines, a can line, and a bag in a box line. So each time you learned a new line, you would also get an incentive and you would get a raise because you learned that skill. And so then the overtime options, you’d have four lines to choose from, right? You have some complexity when you look at seniority and things like that, because we were non-union, but we operated as a union just to make it all fair.

But, along with just the cross training of those production lines, you also had what we had in the maintenance organization, which was once you’ve learned all those production lines, you could then apply to being an apprentice. And that was your route to go to a mechanic. So that’s giving your operator the ability to not only can I tier up to get my pay bumps, to actually learn more and be flexible with what overtime I pick up.

But I can also potentially progress my career into apprenticeship to become a maintenance mechanic, which is an additional pay raise. And also I have other tiers that I can grow and I see a solid career path going forward.

Rahil Siddiqui
So you know how Ed, Alvaro I mentioned I wanted to build tools that I wish I had when I was the HR manager on the factory floor to both of Ari’s points. The way we built the software was exactly as Ari said, if I want to learn how that other line works, I actually first as an operator can see what are all my skill qualifications on my phone through an app or just through a text link.

And then I can also literally raise my hand and say, hey, I want to learn how to run that other line. Right. And so, so we kind of created that by de facto, as well as some of those union based rules that Ari was talking about. And so that complexity gets taken away for supervisors who don’t ever have to wonder, Hey, am I giving the overtime to the right person? Because again, Uber like, we keep going back to that example, all that complexity can be picked away by the online system. And the supervisor just has to say, Hey, I need five people this weekend and then the system does all that magic behind the scenes.

Alvaro Cuba
I love this interaction because Ari’s bringing a best practice and Rahil is bringing immediately the way to optimize it and help it with the new technologies that we have these days. So as we promised guys, different perspectives, all adding up to what you need in your plant.

Ed Ballina
Yeah, to some real creative solutions that’s out there. When you describe this, this whole process of picking people for overtime, right? I worked at a paper mill with about 1200 employees. We literally had a room with about 10 people whose job it was, because it was 24/7 ops, to always make sure that for all the departments were covered, right? And it was a union plant and nobody ever got it 100 % right. So it was a source of grievances and extra pay sometimes for people. 

I was gonna say, you talked about this a little bit, Rahil, but when Ari describes the success story, right, you talked a little bit about infrastructure, but policy changes, right? Sometimes it’s the HR policies, and I’m not saying they’re bad, right, but they get in the way of being able to achieve some of this. Some of that, you know, collective bargaining agreements then need to be opened. It gets really complicated.

Any thoughts on how you replicate that at scale?

Rahil Siddiqui
Yeah. Certainly.  So the analogy I will use here is you’ve got to crawl before you walk, before you run. So there’s got to be a lot of empathy for hundreds, if not thousands of people working a certain way for years and decades potentially in some of these locations. So if you’re talking about a unionized facility, let’s just start digitizing some of the existing rules, right. The example you shared from the paper mill Ed, I  was recently at another global manufacturer that you guys would recognize. They probably have a third, a quarter to a third market share making trucks in this country. As part of their collective bargaining agreement is, I kid you not, I couldn’t make this up, a golf cart. Because the facility is so large that management has negotiated a golf cart to somebody to ride along and find the right person to pick up the overtime because now the union rep gets to do that in the golf cart, right? Versus, and of course they make mistakes just like you said, and that becomes a source of grievances. And we are always sort of reminded that, hey, if there’s a union, we don’t have as much flexibility, management cannot do blah, blah, blah. But guess what?

Software is really good at absorbing very rigid rules. That’s how software works. So we can digitize a lot of that. So in that end of the spectrum, we can get some efficiencies. And then you go to another end of the spectrum where you really don’t have a union. You have a very nimble, flexible, agile culture. Then you get to do a lot more interesting things around, hey, we’re just going to hire a bunch of part-time people. We’re going to create a flex program.

These are the people who get to plug in the gaps based on these sets of rules, et cetera. So yes, policies and procedures and practices all kind of get in the way, but you kind of have to zoom out and think about what does that opportunity cost? Five years, 10 years, 20 years from now, will we be working the way Henry Ford did in 1926? Or will it be a little bit more fluid or more gig-like?

I think it will be a lot more flexible and fluid in the future. We got to get ready.

Alvaro Cuba
I’m not sure Rahil we have all that time. I think we will be kind of forced. Manufacturers are starting to get forced. People are not coming to the plants and the gap is widening. If you don’t go faster, you will not attract the people or even less retain.

I hope that puts a little bit pressure and technology and things, operational things like you are bringing to the table help to accelerate this journey. Go ahead Ed, let’s move on to segment three.

Ed Ballina
Absolutely.  Yeah, let’s move on to our next segment. A little bit more around  the field of maintenance.

So how does a skill-based labor system ensure that you have the right tier three mechanic doing that particular job, right?  High precision repairs, high specific skills. We talked about this a little bit before, but that to me, from a manufacturing standpoint, is my biggest fear. When I need Jerry, the PLC tech, I can’t have Ed, the journeyman electrician, right?

Rahil Siddiqui
Let’s think about what happens today. Right. So I think you may have invoked this example a couple of times, Ed. Today, that foreman is doing all that needs assessment in his or her head. Right? Versus being written down somewhere. Now, let’s be real. It is written down somewhere because we all get audited.

So once a year, at least, we’re going and dusting these documents off for an ISO audit and whatnot. But wouldn’t it be a novel idea to actually make that a living document and somehow make that static data actually work for us? So we are getting more and more  mobile first. So  what can we do to meet our employees where they are?

Most of them look to their mobiles first. How do we now leverage this existing skills matrix data, skills data, and start sort of leveraging that? One other sort of  use case that I’ll call out here is, it’s very frequent that you kind of certified somebody, but in your head, you may be keeping track of when that certification runs out. And are they still okay to go touch a specific machine or a piece of equipment, right? So that again is something that you can easily digitize. You can look at these skills-based scheduling solutions that we build, right? So a couple of different examples for you to think through there.

Alvaro Cuba
I’m thinking about that. This has to be a win-win, Rahil. It has to be a win for the people. It has to be a win for the business.  You were mentioning when we discussed previously examples for instance, machine  fails in the middle of the night. Now we need to leverage the flexibility in the skills matrix. So, how that works in a way that helps the business, for instance, shorten Mean Time To Repair? And at the same time reduces fatigue or  helps the people in the floor with, for instance, mandatory overtime.

Rahil Siddiqui
Yeah. So let me connect your question to something we just  talked about, Why does that skills matrix not, why isn’t it a living document? Why do people ignore it? Right? So it’s actually a relatively simple answer, right? It’s not rocket science because as a supervisor, it’s supervisors, let’s be real, right? It’s not the training people, it’s not HR people, it’s not the plant manager, it is the frontline supervisor that is responsible for keeping this updated. And there is no what’s in it for me, right? There’s nothing in it for the supervisor because you know these folks, to the point of being obnoxious, they’ll tell you, hey, you wake me up at two in the morning and I can tell you who on my team can do what. Yes, they can. We believe them. We know that they do.

And that’s part of the problem that if they do, then they know very painfully every morning when those “oh snap” moments happen, absenteeism, no call, no show, vacations, labor shortage, et cetera. They know the list of three, five, 10, 20 phone numbers that they have to pick up and call or send text messages to and whatnot.

Versus if that skills data was digitized, granular, actually updated, now they can have a scheduling system where they can very seamlessly look for, who’s the backup? Where can I go get that next person? So. This becomes very easy and agile for supervisors and becomes an additional tool in their toolkit.

Let’s also be real, not a silver bullet just because we’re digitizing data is going to solve world peace. No, we have an additional tool in our toolkit that can save some stress, save some time in those “oh snap” moments.

And by the way, one of the best example that I can share with you when we really push this idea to its logical conclusion, which is now I have a toolkit that allows me to manage part-time, flexible people who have no set schedule, but I know who is skilled at what. And then now I can actually move those folks around in a systemic way where the system kind of does all that stuff behind the scenes. And the best outcome of that– We thought it would lead to a little bit of us versus them. Hey, these are the part timers who get to pick and choose when they want to work. Whereas these are the full time folks who are sometimes asked to do mandatory overtime. But it actually ended up being very synergistic. What ended up happening was any time the full time folks, especially the super long tenure who had three, four, five weeks of vacation in the year, when they wanted to take time off, the supervisors could go see, which one of my part timers can come and backfill and cover the gap. All right, now go ahead. Ed, take your time off, right? So that became really, really synergistic.

Ed Ballina
You’re absolutely right. Part of the problem is we use these very broad bucket skill categories to dump people into, right? They’re not surgical enough, right? A level one mechanic could be very capable or barely capable in true application.

Alvaro Cuba
I think it will be great to hear Ari’s perspective on that. You manage all this in the middle of the night, I’m sure many times, and  how all this is a promise in the paper, how you see it versus your experience. Is this a solution? Is there is a gap where you see the gap?

Arianna Flores
Yeah, yeah, no, think they’re all fair questions and it, sounds like an awesome solution, honestly. I have had my fair share of middle of the night phone calls. ⁓ and I do feel like a flexible skills based system is the solution and what we need to work towards. But some of the realistic things when I, when I think of, you know, some problems that I’ve encountered in the middle of the night is just. I think of more so your technical skill base. And I know that we’ve talked about it a little bit where, you know, in this flexible skill based system, it seems a little bit more geared towards, you know, your operators, your warehouse workers. But if you think of, you know, your quality technicians or your maintenance mechanics, that’s a little bit more of a tiered  skill base. And then you throw on the fact that, you know, you’re having problems staffing maintenance mechanics because they don’t have the skill sets that they used to have.

They’re not necessarily mechanically, electrically and  PLC trained. They can turn into parts replacers. Some of them don’t understand process and don’t know how to solve for process. So this system would be great in theory, but what it really needs is a robust training infrastructure. You need a sufficient pool that you can grab from what this skilled labor across the technical domains that we were just discussing.

Without proper controls and the redundancy, you’re limited on that non, to just non-technical work for the solution. And, you know, there’s a difference between certified and capable at two or three o’clock in the morning. And I can tell you right now, a lot of those times, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, and I can tell you right now, most of the times that I received those calls in the middle of the night, it wasn’t like I needed a tier one mechanic who could just focus on mechanical issues. It was a PLC logic issue. It was a very complicated and complex electrical issue that I needed to call my senior controls technician and wake him up and be like, hey, me and you need to be at the plant in about 30 minutes. Can we do that? So I think it’s a great solution. I just think that to put it in true application, there’s gonna be a little bit of work behind the scenes for some of those  types of roles.

Rahil Siddiqui
I think you’re spot on with that, right? And one of the ways that  I’ve heard some of our larger customers discuss this is the number of people who want to work in manufacturing is decreasing, unfortunately, and not increasing, right? So that pool to your point is actually going down. It is shrinking. And so when you do have folks who are actively opting to work in manufacturing, eight hours a day, five days a week, or whatever full-time schedule they have, right? You have an opportunity to cross-train, up-skill, right? And cross-skill people and take them up that ladder like you mentioned the example with the apprentices, et cetera. And you can use some of your lower to mid-skilled folks to backfill them. And that can be done with a number of these part-time type options. Folks who are able to give you their full time and the commitment to go up-skill and learn new technical  skills, they can continue to sort of be at that tippy top of that  skills matrix.

Ed Ballina
That, Ari, your description of the two o’clock in the morning phone call brought back PTSD. I’ll never forget one night, you wake up, you’re groggy, and you’re getting bombarded with, this is what’s going on, and we did this, we did this, we did that. And I was like, well, did you try XYZ? And we did that. After about the third thing, I just, I know, I came over, I told the guy, what do you think this is, dial-a-prayer? I said, I have no idea. I said, I’ll be there in 45 minutes, okay? I have no idea. Rahil, I was gonna ask you to respond to the concerns around control and redundancy, but frankly, you covered it.

But a follow up on that is how do you, you know, giving operator flexibility in, you know, what do I work on creates a better culture, you know, it may be called operator driven reliability that some people call level one maintenance, you know, clean, lubricate, bolt tightened down, but  how do you incentivize people to use those skills, right? Because one thing to your point is give them the skill and maybe they get some pay, but you know, how do you actually make that payout?

Rahil Siddiqui
Yeah, I think Ari mentioned that as a really good  example, and she may have said it a little too quickly in the flow of her argument, which is, look, we’ve cross-trained these people. Now they get to pick overtime from multiple shifts. And it’s not just that we’ve given them a 50 cent hourly pay bump, right? Now we’ve actually given them the opportunity for voluntary overtime. And the shots on goal has now increased, right? I may now raise my hand not for two lines, but for four lines.

Still remains to be seen if it’s like a union run type environment where I still have to be on the right end of that pecking order.  But at least I have more opportunities now. So that becomes  one of those ways that  you’re incentivizing people. The other side of this  coin is, yes, we did that training, but we haven’t had a lot of opportunities to actually deploy this person to keep those skills refreshed, right? So we know some of these skills have a terrible half-life. And as we start degrading some of those skills, we’ve thought about this and we’ve almost gamified this in our system where we can proactively let the right folks know that, hey, in another 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, this skill will potentially get decertified, right?

Ed Ballina
Right. You have to re-up.

Rahil Siddiqui
And then we’ve made some very interesting design choices on when that skill is really decertified, do we still let the individual get an alert on their phone that, hey, look, you’re missing. You could have had that over time. You could have. Go talk to your supervisor. So there’s some interesting things that we can do to sort of get the whole system to be incentivized to move in a direction where we’re sort of keeping the demand side and the supply side or moving along at the same pace.

Alvaro Cuba
And it goes even far beyond the demand and the supply side. It goes to what you’re saying, incentivize. We have to retain that people. We have to make the job fun.  The possibility of they working in one line or another line or going to the next week to the warehouse. That gives movement opportunity to think, develop and all that.

Ed Ballina
So moving forward,  Ari, based on your journey from there on the front lines and the trenches to now tech more of a support, you know, technology. What advice would you give a maintenance manager trying to retain their best people? You’ve lived this. 

Arianna Flores
Yeah, that is a great question. And actually before I left, I had to do that very thing and try to keep one of my best technicians from getting swooped up by another company. So I definitely lived it before, but it’s, I think there’s some key things, right? So elevating the role for technicians, it’s not just a technician, they’re a problem solver. They have to understand so much more than we give them credit for. What are the different tier sets that you can, that you can kind of differentiate against. You know, their agnostic, analytical, problem-solving skills. Like what value does that bring? And how can you kind of articulate that? Giving ownership of metrics and KPIs. I can’t tell you how many times I created a scoreboard and my mechanics were just like, I want to be in the green. I don’t want to be in the red. I don’t want to be on the naughty list. Exactly. And it’s also giving them the why.

What do they do? What business impact do they have? If they know that they saved $50,000 worth of downtime, that’s a huge motivator. That’s something that they can say that they directly affected.  And it’s not only that, right? It’s also investing in that tech forward training. So, you know, I was trying to partner with a local college and trying to get free tuition because it’s job-based training, right? To upskill and, and then being able to send  technicians to learn PLC logic, not just from Allen-Bradley systems, but for Siemens, which is a little bit more difficult to learn. Yeah, a little bit more difficult to learn  from experience.  But my goodness, and one of the things that we did that was already based in the culture at my work was just the tiered aspect, having those tiers, having that progression plan. having box tests that they were able to do where they actually tested their capability and were able to see pass or fail. Did they actually progress to that next tier?  And then just making sure they were staying competitive. That was the biggest thing that I had to work through with my senior control technician and getting him into a new role where he did so much. He was the SME for the entire plant. No joke. Not only for maintenance, but also for quality, because we had new quality and production teams that were coming in. So he was so integral to that plant’s success that we had to keep him. I had to create a new role for him and elevate it to where he actually was performing.

Ed Ballina
Well, that, that, that, is such a great point. Cause I think one of the things that many companies got caught with was significantly underpaying their  technical people. Okay. There was one of my customers was paying line mechanics, $25 an hour in a major urban metropolitan area. Guess what they were getting? Not the skills they needed. So you need to invest in people, right? Not just in training and all that. That’s all good.

But in their pocketbook, okay? You gotta pay them what they’re worth, because if not, they will vote with their feet, and you won’t like the outcome of that. That is, those are great answers.

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, payment, incentive, retention, motivation, you hit it, all of them.  Yeah, big one. Rahil, one last question.  You mentioned a lot is old culture and difficult to change. If you are an HR or a progressive plant manager and you have corporate or  someone not seeing the picture, what would be a very small pilot that you would say, hey, go for this, show the value and open their eyes for bigger ideas?

Rahil Siddiqui
Definitely. In the spirit of this podcast, the way we,  Ed and Alvaro, with your personalities, I’ll maybe be a little bit cheeky and first say, don’t do what Ed did with his son, talk about Uber, right?  That immediately shuts people down for all the right reasons, right? So let’s not invoke the gig economy first thing.

But on a serious note, one of the talk tracks that I found intriguingly and it’s a little bit dark, but I think people get around to it as, can this factory really exist a few years out if we don’t have the labor pool to support it? It’s a little bit of a dark thought. But then bring it a little bit home with, and it’s a little bit patronizing, but I think there’s a right way of having this conversation. And the only way people kind of relate to something is when you bring it home to them. And once I start talking to supervisor, very old school type folks of, hey, your kids, your nephews and nieces, they don’t work the way you do, right? They have a different work ethic. It all comes real, right? Like, yeah, yeah.

And they get it. And that’s when those two points come together. Like, yeah, if that’s who has to come and keep this thing in business, oh my God. So how do we look at something different? Now, on bit of a more practical note, I’ll share with you one of my favorite stories from one of our customers. That’s the largest earth moving manufacturer in this country. One of their HR managers was temporarily supporting a factory in Little Rock, Arkansas. She had to live out of a hotel for a week or two weeks. This woman’s walking up to a TGIF to pick up her dinners every day. And she sees right in front of her a door dasher with a little kid waiting to pick up somebody’s door dash order. And on her jacket, she sees the logo of this large manufacturer. So our HR manager says, hey, do you work for them? And the door dasher says, yes. And so she, our HR manager introduces herself with, know, I’m the HR person, I’m curious, do you do this in addition to your job at the factory? And this lady pours her heart out that, yeah, I have this little kid, I don’t really have a, you know, I’m a single mom, I don’t have a good coverage pattern, and we’ve been doing so much mandatory overtime, I don’t know how long I can keep at it. And so that little interaction leads to the first pilot at this company that makes a lot of yellow vehicles, right? You know what I’m talking about.

So what they ended up doing, to your point, is in a couple of their factories, they simply hired a bunch of part-time employees, between five to 10 part-time employees, and they literally started off text messaging them, SMS, hey, I need two people here. I need five people there. No system, no skills matrix, nothing. It worked phenomenally.

The next thing we know, they were looking for a software solution to support that. The next thing we know, we have six factories doing this, somewhere between 70 to 100 part-time employees starting to support operations in a number of those facilities. So you know, the cat’s out of the bag now, and I think this is how the world of work is going to evolve. It’s just a matter of when do we think it’s time to sort of leverage more part-time options and not keep looking to the past of eight hours a day, five days a week and mandatory overtime.

Ed Ballina
Well, I think Alvaro and I would both tell you, yeah, that the time is now. That the time is now. We’ve got a looming gap. 50% of manufacturing jobs go unfilled every year and it’s getting worse. So there’s a huge urgency around this. So one last question before we wrap this up.

Alvaro Cuba
Thank you for sharing those stories. Go ahead Ed, sorry.

Ed Ballina
If you could change one mindset about American frontline labor, specifically manufacturing, what would it be? And this is a question for both of you.

Rahil Siddiqui
I want to reiterate what Ari said earlier. The quantity of work somebody does does not have to equate to the quality of the work that they’re doing.

Alvaro Cuba
That’s a great one. Yes. Ari? Ari?

Arianna Flores
I was going to say I agree with that 100%. I think that’s the paradigm shift. That’s really the true roadblocker that I see with this becoming successful and actually being implemented across the board and most companies is that people want you to kind of be there all the time, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be to what Rahil said and to what we’ve talked about earlier, the quality of what they actually give you. The quality of the cases they put out doesn’t have to be 8 to 12 hours.

Ed Ballina
The huggy blanket, right? We want the huggy blanket of physical, you know,  connection into the plant. And we’re driving tons and tons of people away that we desperately need. 

Alvaro Cuba
Yeah, and that’s it’s starting to work in the offices, no? Because even in there has been difficult to change that mentality, no? So you can work from home and no matter the hours, you’ll be productive. Now we need to start bringing it to the plant and pushing for the other side with the urgency that if you don’t do this, you will run out of people in your plant.

Ed Ballina
Yes. to the shop floor.

Alvaro Cuba
But okay, thank you very much guys. We have enjoyed this conversation and I hope you guys in the plants have  had fun and enjoy this conversation and very practical from both sides,  opportunities, constraints, how to make this work and as Ed said, it’s now.

Ed Ballina
This has been awesome. Thank you.

Alvaro Cuba
So thank you very much Rahil, thank you very much Ari, pleasure to have you.

Arianna Flores
Thank you.

Ed Ballina
I thought it was terrific. Thank you both. This is great.

Alvaro Cuba
Perfect combination. Thank you so much. Well, friends,  this is wrap up for the episode. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for bringing your pals. If you enjoy it, please follow us, subscribe. More important, yes, tell your friends.  If you are watching us in YouTube, please like us. If you are listening to us in iTunes, review and let’s grow this meetup.

Ed Ballina
Absolutely. If you want to keep the conversation going, you can email us at mmu@augury.com We actually have answered some comments from people that have posted. ⁓ So we also have the links to Rahil’s work in the show notes for the episode. So  happy holidays, may you celebrate with your family  and happy new year. Hopefully you’re not freezing as much as I am, but  thank you. See you next time.

Alvaro Cuba
Happy holidays, guys. Thank you very much. See you next time. Bye.