Reimagine your relationship with your blue collar employees.
How your team thinks about shift work has been shifting for years.
The pandemic alone didn’t cause that. But it sure as hell accelerated it.
Now, employees the world over, including yours, are reframing and rethinking what they want from work. What they want at work. What they want instead of what no longer works.
What they want for them. And ultimately from you.
If you’ve run out of guesses about what they want…
If you've nailed enough Jell-O to the wall to fill a 45-gallon drum with no real effect…
If you’ve read every HR report and attended every webinar and still nothing seems to be working, perhaps it’s time for a more simple approach.
Just ask them.
Yes. Simply ask your employees want they want.
Listen to what they say.
Then do as much of that as you can.
Not sure where to begin? No problem. We can do it together.
It starts with courage.
The workplace has become quite uppity. It is now frothy with fancy digital platforms, meticulously planned and staged events, and inspirational messages that are supposed to work, at least according to the AI robots that wrote them.
Shift employees want something more simple than that. Not because they themselves are simple. But because they spend all day long doing their work in the most simple and efficient ways possible. Lean, agile, gemba, kaizen, just in time delivery: these operational methodologies define their workday. As a result, these processes influence what blue collar employees expect from most everything else that happens at work.
There’s no need to fix it. Just feature it. If simple, honest and real internal comms and workplace experiences are what your blue collar employees expect from you and your leaders, then let’s figure out exactly what that means to them and deliver it.
It starts with courage. Your courage: to ask, to listen, to understand, to act. And their courage: to answer, to share, to meet you halfway, to work together to build the workplace you all want and deserve.
Your employees’ work life is my life’s work.
For 35 years, I’ve worked for and with CEOs, CHROs, COOs and CCOs to help them better understand how to inform, involve and inspire their employees.
My approach works with all employees. But it is especially effective with blue collar employees.
Why? Because I grew up in a blue collar household. My Dad was an assembly line foreman at a school bus plant and my Mom was a secretary at the bank. Both of them were the very definition of blue collar their whole lives. And so were the people I grew up with in my hometown of Fort Valley, Ga., a place so small that Rand and McNally barely gave us a dot.
Those early days impacted me. Shaped me. And inspired me to build my career around making that kind of work — and the honest, hard-working people who do it — matter.
Together, we can pair my deep blue collar workplace experience and your unrealized opportunity to make work matter more.
Get in touch.
For 35 years, I’ve helped companies just like yours reimagine their relationships with their blue collar employees.
Let’s talk about how I can help you.