1. Align workforce planning with production
86% of manufacturers expect employment costs to increase over the next 12 months, while 37% identify employment costs as a key business risk in 2026 (Make UK).
Build workforce plans around production forecasts, investment plans, and future skills requirements. Work with operations and finance to identify critical roles, retirement risks, persistent vacancies and areas with high overtime or agency usage.
Use scenarios to test how changes in demand, automation or product strategy could affect headcount and capability. This gives leaders time to recruit, retrain or redeploy people before workforce gaps disrupt production.
2. Build a visible skills pipeline
99% of manufacturers say access to skills will shape their future growth plans, and half identify skills shortages as their biggest current barrier to growth (Make UK).
Manufacturing skills often take years to develop. Create a live skills matrix showing employee competencies, qualifications, licences, training status, and recertification dates.
Use this insight to prioritise apprenticeships, cross-training, mentoring, and succession planning. Employees should also be able to see the skills required for progression, helping them build a career within the organisation.
3. Make onboarding safety-led and role-specific
Half of manufacturers expect AI to significantly reshape jobs and working practices within two years (Make UK).
Good onboarding improves confidence, competence, and retention. Alongside policies and payroll information, induction should cover site safety, equipment, quality standards, shift arrangements, and role expectations.
Spread learning across the first few weeks rather than overloading employees on day one. Managers should confirm practical competence before new starters work independently and schedule regular check-ins during the first three months.
4. Manage shifts, fatigue, and wellbeing together
38.3% of manufacturers identified mental ill health as a main cause of long-term sickness absence, while 30.9% cited musculoskeletal conditions (Make UK).
Shift patterns affect safety, absence, engagement, and performance. Review consecutive shifts, night-work rotation, recovery time, overtime, and short-notice changes.
Flexible working can still exist in manufacturing. Shift swaps, staggered starts, fixed patterns, compressed hours and annualised hours can give employees greater control while maintaining production coverage.
Monitor wellbeing alongside absence, overtime, and safety data. A rise across several measures may indicate understaffing, fatigue, or weak management rather than an individual employee issue.
5. Equip frontline managers to lead
Make UK found that 50% of employees said additional training and development would improve their wellbeing.
Production supervisors have a major influence on employee experience. Technical expertise alone does not prepare someone to manage performance, absence, conflict, or wellbeing.
Provide practical training, simple policies and reliable people data. Managers should hold regular conversations, recognise good work, address concerns early and apply decisions consistently. This builds trust and reduces the likelihood that manageable issues become grievances or resignations. For example, with People First, our customers have seen a 9% increase in scores from employee engagement surveys, driven by better manager and employee connectivity.
6. Connect time, attendance and payroll
Accurate pay is fundamental to employee trust. Manufacturing payroll may include shift premiums, overtime, allowances, bonuses and varied working patterns, making disconnected processes particularly risky.
Integrating scheduling, time, attendance, HR and payroll can reduce manual input, improve visibility and help ensure employees are paid correctly and on time.
7. Use workforce data to act earlier
More than a quarter of manufacturers expect to lose 10% of their workforce to retirement within five years (Make UK).
Track measures by site, role, shift and manager, including turnover, vacancies, absence, overtime, agency usage, time to competence, training compliance and payroll exceptions.
Look for relationships between measures. High overtime combined with rising absence and safety incidents, for example, may reveal a capacity problem requiring recruitment or reskilling.
How People First can help
People First is MHR’s unified people platform, bringing together HR, payroll, workforce management, recruitment, onboarding, talent, learning and analytics.
For manufacturers, People First can improve workforce visibility, connect attendance with pay, support skills development and give employees and managers greater ownership through self-service. Its workforce management capabilities can also help organisations create schedules that meet operational requirements while reducing errors and compliance risks.
Replacing disconnected systems and spreadsheets with consistent, real-time information allows HR teams to spend less time reconciling data and more time strengthening workforce resilience.
The most effective HR practices in manufacturing have one principle in common: people strategy and operational strategy work together. When manufacturers plan skills, support managers, protect wellbeing and use workforce data effectively, they create safer, more productive, and more sustainable operations.
