The Future of the Industrial Workforce

September 24, 2020   |

WRITTEN BY HAYTHAM ELHAWARY, CO FOUNDER & CEO

Kinetic co-founder and CEO Haytham Elhawary believes companies who invest in smart tech for their workforce have a big advantage.

I consider myself a recovering roboticist. When I graduated with my PhD in robotics and biomechanics, I imagined a not-too-distant future where robots would be a part of our everyday lives, in our homes and on our roads. The only people you’d see in a warehouse would be engineers and the occasional security guard.

With this vision in mind, I spent nearly 10 years of my career developing robots at Philips Electronics and Harvard Medical School. However, over time I grew skeptical of their short-term impact, because it’s actually really hard to replace the dexterity, flexibility and adaptability of humans with technology. While I still believe robots will replace many functions and jobs, I now see this as a more distant reality — one perhaps still 25 to 50 years away.

So, what happens between now and our supposedly much more automated future? The short-term future, and the big opportunity today, is in the utilization of smart technology to augment the workforce, not replace it.

Companies who invest in tech that will help them retain their workers, keep them safe and healthy, and get them to peak productivity, will hold a massive advantage over those who do not.

An Underinvested In Workforce

The industrial workforce, with its approximate 50 million workers who build our houses, manufacture our goods, and deliver our packages, is severely underinvested in technology. While it comprises a third of the U.S. workforce, it receives only 1% of business software spend. The impact of this underinvestment is increasingly clear, especially in three areas: productivity, safety, and worker retention.

Productivity

There is massive inconsistency in productivity levels across industrial facilities, where worker performance and technology adoption are highly variable. This is especially evident in the e-commerce sector where enormous growth is not being met by efficient automation. Instead, if you go to a warehouse, you’ll see it’s being sustained by armies of people, sweat, and grit. Still, labor needs are growing faster than output. Another example is the construction industry, which is less productive today than it was in the 1960s. In the U.S., it’s the second-least digitized sector after agriculture.

Safety

The state of worker safety is equally surprising. With unrelenting production pressure on industrial workers, they’re working longer hours, performing more repetitive motions, and experiencing high rates of overexertion. As such, they’re getting injured at alarming rates. Every year in the U.S., three million workers are injured on the job and over $150 billion is spent on workplace injuries.

Retention

Finally, worker turnover in these sectors is commonly over 75%, which in the current labor market, means companies are spending more and more of their time and money to replace and retrain their workforce. Already faced with immense labor shortages, especially in the manufacturing industry due to a mounting skills gap, worker turnover is a real problem that impacts the bottom line, productivity, and employee morale.

Moving Forward

There is a huge opportunity to provide the industrial workforce with technology that makes them more productive, safer, and their work more rewarding. This is what drives my business today. Companies like Kinetic and others are already building the tech to enhance and augment the industrial workforce. 

And the workforce is ready. We’re in the golden age of portable computing, where devices like tablets and wearables provide solutions to deskless or field workers in a way laptops never could. Furthermore, millennials, who have grown up with technology, are now the largest generation in the workforce.

Companies that are ready to invest in their workforce now will be the winners in the short-term future.

Similar to how companies that invested in assembly lines in the 1920s won, and those that moved to lean manufacturing in the 1980s won, companies that augment their workforce in the 2020s will rise to the top with a safe, productive, and engaged workforce. That’s the future, and at Kinetic, we’re helping to build it.

Haytham Elhawary

CEO & Cofounder, KINETIC

2019 KINETIC © All rights reserved.

2019 KINETIC © All rights reserved.