Don’t neglect employees and quality leadership in the age of automation.

It’s tempting to believe people are losing importance to your company as automation replaces humans with machine labor. You would be correct in that the numbers of employees tend to decline with automation.

The flip side is the scarcity principle: these remaining employees become more critical to your company’s success as their expectations of you rise.

Amazon is a good example of automation. Their fulfillment centers traditionally employed people to sort, pack, and transport goods, but robots like Robin, Cardinal, Sparrow, and Proteus have automated these tasks. For instance, Sparrow can handle items from bins, and Proteus assists with moving carts. These robots have improved efficiency and reduced the need for manual labor.

Examples Abound: 20 Years Ago Versus Today

20 Years Ago: Dozens of workers were needed on assembly lines to manually weld, paint, assemble parts, and inspect vehicles. Today, robots handle welding, painting, and assembly with greater precision and consistency, supervised by a few technicians and engineers.

20 Years Ago: Workers operated multiple looms, monitored machinery, and performed quality checks manually. Today, computerized and automated looms produce textiles with minimal human intervention, requiring only a few operators to oversee the process.

20 Years Ago: Workers manually fed metal sheets into stamping presses and performed secondary operations like polishing and cutting. Today, robotic arms perform metal stamping and fabrication with higher efficiency and accuracy, monitored by a small team of operators.

20 Years Ago: Workers sorted, processed, packaged, and labeled food items manually, often in assembly-line formats. Today, automated conveyor systems, sorting machines, and packaging robots perform most tasks, requiring fewer employees for oversight and maintenance.

Your Workforce Is Getting Scarce

It’s tempting to believe the importance of your people reduces as automation increases. The opposite is the case. 

Employees with specialized skills become harder to replace. Fewer workers mean each has broader responsibilities impacting operations, quality, and efficiency. Losing one in twenty employees has a small impact. Losing one of two is significant.

You will rely on fewer employees to identify problems, offer fresh ideas, and try new things, so building their psychological confidence is vital for quality assurance, operations, and customer interaction.

Customer-facing roles remain high-touch, even as your processes become more high-tech. Employees in these roles maintain the company’s reputation and revenue.

Long-term employees often carry valuable institutional knowledge that cannot be automated even as they help integrate new technologies into existing processes.

As the human workforce grows more scarce in manufacturing, the importance of the people you retain skyrockets. Their expectations for quality leadership are higher than two decades ago and increasing. Is your company’s leadership quality rising at the same pace?

I created a new program, Building an Inspiring Culture®, that positions you to lead tomorrow’s workforce by giving you practical tools to develop a shared mental model for your culture, identify your company’s standards, gain buy-in, and create accountability that continuously improves future performance. You can check it out here.

I often use this program for group coaching because owners and CEOs have found that having a shared mental model, toolset, and dictionary puts people on the same page, improves trust, and strengthens communication. Please reply to this email or schedule a call to see if something like this would be a good fit for you.