There’s a demographic shift moving through industrial floors right now, and most operations are feeling it before they’ve named it. Experienced employees are staying on the job longer. And the pipeline of new hires coming in behind them isn’t keeping pace.
The takeaway is simple: you’re leaning on your most experienced workers more than you used to, and that’s likely to stay true for a while. The good news is that keeping those people healthy, comfortable, and productive is largely a design problem, and design problems have solutions.