Attracting and Retaining Skilled Talent could help your organization bridge the workforce gap.
 

Gone are the days when employees, even hourly ones, want to come into work and simply do their job. In general, people today want to do good work, and they want to know that good work counts for something. If they don’t, they’ll leave. And if the industry isn’t making the necessary improvements, they’ll find another manufacturing-related industry that is.

“If you only have 75% of the industry saying they’re doing a particular program, that leaves a quarter of the industry not even doing it,” observed Marjorie Hellmer, president of Cypress Research. “That’s not acceptable. These programs need to be at 100%.”

The issue of the workforce gap may seem bleak — dire, even — but there are some places where the industry is finding success. To not only celebrate this but also create a go-to resource for any bakery to reference, Cypress wrote Attracting and Retaining Skilled Talent, an e-book of case studies from companies with forward-thinking strategies for attracting, training and retaining employees. 

“During executive interviews we heard some illustrations that we thought were particularly innovative, so we requested to do a limited number of case studies for a branded e-book,” Ms. Hellmer said. Among some of the bakeries that participated were ARYZTA, The Bama Companies, King’s Hawaiian and more. The book is available now at www.americanbakers.org and www.asbe.org.