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A competitive company’s strongest maintenance assets are — and will continue to be — its staff. This requires it to prioritize training as the best preventive and proactive measure for corporate longevity.

How Poor Training Impacts Industry: neglecting education and failing to upskill will lead to severe consequences for organizations. Their machinery will begin to fault and fail regularly, costing copious resources for replacements and compensating for lost productivity. Continued failures to process orders in time create a resentful customer base, while trained employees could prevent this from happening.

Dismissing the importance of fine-tuning the workforce’s knowledge about modern maintenance measures — especially for new equipment — introduces safety concerns, absenteeism and low morale among the team. Injuries, fatalities and illnesses resulting in workers' compensation claims run companies over $1 billion weekly. If they were more familiar with how to use and maintain equipment to safe standards, these costs may be avoidable.

Additionally, improving the workforce’s knowledge about machinery maintenance boosts productivity because they become familiar with the most effective ways to preserve their lifespan. Equipment could work at peak efficiency for longer periods as staff apply their knowledge and see beneficial results in real time. This eventually translates into higher product quality, which reinforces an entity’s reputation among its audience, competitors and stakeholders.

The gratification could make people feel more satisfied with their work, which inspires them to come to work more regularly and become tenured professionals. These side effects are ideal from a maintenance perspective because every team member becomes an expert in their employer’s specific machinery. The longer they work on maintaining the same devices, the more their familiarity positively impacts the organization.

They eventually begin to waste fewer materials, parts and time. When replacing business-critical parts like bearings or conveyor rollers, they conserve energy and prevent irreparable damage to machinery. The positive reinforcement confirms the value of the training.

How to Create a Culture of Continuous Learning: Management teams and workers must have equal buy-in to benefit fully from educational programs. Otherwise, engagement and retention will be low. Therefore, stakeholders must establish a cohesive mindset among maintenance teams that celebrates professional development and continuing education. These are the most effective strategies for implementing and solidifying this change.

Use the Kaizen Mentality: Kaizen is a Japanese learning philosophy leaders worldwide are adopting. It makes learning accessible by focusing on incremental changes that lead to increased expertise and gains over time. It incorporates observational walks, root-cause analysis and community engagement as part of the learning process to involve everyone equally.

For maintenance professionals, this is ideal because it gradually introduces technicians to new problems and a wide range of solutions for addressing them. Doing so is better than bombarding professionals with everything all at once, which can be demoralizing if a team member cannot remember every detail.

Share Responsibility: many facilities have distinctions between production experts and maintenance professionals. Blending these worlds to remove silos democratizes access to maintenance knowledge, making every worker more well-rounded and proactive in the event of an issue. This is a frequent tactic used in total productive maintenance frameworks, which spreads knowledge by:

• Sharing documents across teams.

• Having interdepartmental training sessions.

• Fostering human-robot collaboration with autonomous technologies.

• Reminding staff of best practices.

Embed Training Into Workflows: if training is a part of an employee’s job description and task structure, they are likely more willing to accept it as part of their responsibilities. On-the-job training remains vital, but external resources are equally important for providing a comprehensive education.

Some enterprises are leveraging gamified experiences like virtual reality training to improve knowledge retention by up to 80%, which could give staff something to look forward to. Others are incorporating skill development through mandatory mentorship programs, where new hires are paired with experienced professionals to convey knowledge in a more interpersonal medium.

How Training Creates Competitive Organizations:pursuing this effort can yield significant benefits for companies, enhancing their reputation and competitiveness within the sector.

Productivity Equals Profitability: well-trained workers have more intimate knowledge of the equipment and software they maintain. This information can reduce human error and eliminate costly mistakes associated with harmful maintenance practices. Research from the Association for Talent Development found that businesses with better training increase income per employee by 218%, resulting in more overall revenue.

Innovation Creates Adaptability: more expansive training opportunities introduce workforces to more ways to maintain equipment. As their knowledge grows, they become more adept at generating solutions independently. The increase in agency will likely make them more receptive to the idea of disruptive technologies integrating into their workflow.

Doing so reinforces a culture of adaptability. Therefore, greater education could correlate with more innovative corporate practices as staff buy-in increases.

Brand Recognition Attracts Talent: organizations with an educational commitment become reputable employers with strong brand awareness. The best talent in the pool becomes curious about these enterprises, which improves maintenance protocols by attracting the industry’s top talent. Additionally, workers who come to a company and are excited to work there might be more likely to stay, which results in lower turnover as a by-product of prioritizing training.

In turn, this lowers the responsibilities required by acquisition and recruiting professionals. They would need to issue fewer marketing campaigns to find prospective staff and spend less time interviewing and onboarding newcomers.

Transforming Training From an Expense to a Strategic Imperative: many companies may consider education as an unjustifiable cost because it removes workers from their stations and causes downtime. However, accounting and management teams must view it as more than a budgetary item. Training is a technique for improving resilience, bottom lines and workforce skills. A sector’s foremost thought leaders became juggernauts by empowering their employees with maintenance skills for the coming generation, and everyone else must follow suit. 

Text: Guest column by Elli Gabel   Photo: Elli Gabel ARCHIVE, Shutterstock

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Elli Gabel