GENERATION MANAGEMENT, LEADERSHIP,
SAFETY AND WELL-BEING
Role: Researcher and consultant｜Client: 4 manufacturing companies in Switzerland｜Year: 2010-2012
Project context: Manufacturing organizations in Switzerland are faced with the challenges of an ageing workforce, knowledge transfer, and leading multi-generation teams. Under this broader research question, we collaborated with 4 companies to assess their readiness now, and made projections 5 and 10 years into the future.
Team: We were a core research team of 2, and collaborated closely with different senior stakeholders in all four client companies (e.g., heads of HR, heads of occupational safety).
My role was to research the current status quo, develop two different surveys for employees and leaders, design and conduct expert interviews, conduct field research, analyze all data, co-write reports, co-design and co-lead insights and strategy workshops with different stakeholder groups.
Methods: Service design approach. Interviews, surveys, field observations, quantitative data analysis of organizational data. Interactive insights workshops, co-creation workshops, strategy workshops.
Impact
For each company we created two versions of the insights reports and and two insight and ideation workshops: one for the employees and middle management and one for top management, in which the inputs from the employee workshops were integrated and developed further.
Based on our work, the following happened*:
- change in shift model to a 3-shift forward rolling model (which is proven to be better for
- change in recruitment strategy to create a more age-diverse employee base
- more frequent and correct use of ergonomic support equipment
- actionable plans to create more age-diverse teams and to learn from those team leads who were
already successfully leading multi-generational teams
- strategic decision to design more varied roles in the factories to minimize physical and psychological
strain for employees who stay in the job over a longer period of time.
*this list is not exhaustive and it is an aggregate from all 4 companies :)
Mixed-methods approach
For the research and analysis we used a mixed-methods approach, validated the results with different stakeholder groups. We designed and led separate ideation workshops with the group of workers, managers and business unit leaders.
More coming soon!