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ON FRONTLINE TALENT SCARCITY Turning worker scarcity into opportunity
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| Over the past couple of years, businesses have faced frontline talent scarcity at a level that leaders may never have seen before. What amplified the challenge was that companies’ typical solution stopped working: just offering another dollar or two per hour hasn't moved the needle.
That’s partly because employees are looking for more from their jobs. But scarcity has also become a more complex problem because it affects multiple industries at once: manufacturing, retail, warehousing, and truck driving. In manufacturing alone in the United States, the most recent data show almost 500,000 unfilled jobs—a figure that the National Association of Manufacturers projects could well rise to almost two million by 2034. Frontline workers can move between sectors more easily than ever, so any one company has more competitors for talent.
Plus, jobs are changing. At today’s fast-food restaurants, customers start at a kiosk or in an app, placing their orders themselves. These companies don’t need workers to take orders, but they do need them to interact with customers, make the food, and ensure quality. It’s similar in manufacturing, where the level of automation keeps rising. Instead of performing manual tasks, people spend more time solving complex problems and interacting with computers, robotics, and AI.
Frontline talent is a global issue. Although it was exacerbated in the United States by specific macroeconomic conditions, the employee skill and capability transition is pretty universal. Even in places where there are enough frontline workers, there often aren’t enough with the right capabilities to do what frontline employees need to do these days.
Talent scarcity is resetting the narrative about automation. People used to see automation almost as a four-letter word—presuming that it would take away jobs. But companies have learned that automation often takes away the tasks that employees like the least, such as heavy lifting in a factory or warehouse. For a finance person in a back office, it’s taking away the most trivial and boring aspects of the job.
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| | | “Real transformations have happened when leaders listened to what frontline employees wanted to be automated: the parts of their jobs that they liked the least.” | | | | |
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| | | | Dan Swan is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Connecticut office. | | |
| | | | | | | | | Not all e-commerce approaches are created equal. The most successful companies bring their technology talent and capabilities in-house to give them the speed and flexibility to adapt quickly to market opportunities. | | | | |
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