Workforces in supply chain: the smallest cog keeps everything moving

A worker in an industrial building, wearing a hard hat, hi vis clothing, and holding a tablet computer.

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Dr Grant Charlesworth-Jones is uniquely qualified as both a GP and a Barrister, bringing a wealth of experience from the medical, legal, and occupational health fields. His diverse background inspired him to create D4Drivers, now the UK's largest provider of driver health assessments. A speaker at the Loughborough University UK SCALE Centre Symposium, in this article, he outlines the importance of supporting and maintaining a healthy workforce for the future of industry.

Dr Grant Charlesworth-Jones
Dr Grant Charlesworth-Jones

Learn more about the UK SCALE Centre

The world is changing and our approach to the supply chain workforce must do the same. Companies can only understand the world that they can see, and so hubs such as the UK SCALE Centre are essential for developing full visibility of the supply chain environment, enabling decision makers to make better informed choices.

Supply chain stakeholders often focus on large scale organisational or infrastructure projects which provide a broad basis to meet the needs of the economies and industries they are connected to.

These projects are the result of deep research and analysis of numerous factors. However, what is often missing is a lack of consideration for what sometimes appears to be a small element in all this planning – the individual workers and teams required to actually achieve these grand, strategic plans.

Many businesses have long relied on the assumption that improving workforce retention isn’t an important consideration, because there’s always a queue of workers waiting to replace the ones leaving. Contrary to this belief, generational shifts in attitudes to working, to job roles in transport, logistics and supply chains, together with the lasting impact of the pandemic, have meant that departing workers are not easy to replace.

Workers no longer embrace being ‘thrown in the deep end’ to work as they would have tolerated in times past. A more informed and considered approach is now required to get the best performance from workers.

A person on a sofa coughing/sneezing into a tissue.

Furthermore, the progress of firms in the past quarter century to reduce staff sickness absence has been entirely undone by the pandemic. Absenteeism has reverted to levels last seen in the 1990s and could get worse still. In addition to absenteeism, presenteeism (attending work but not working at full capacity) is no less of a problem for organisations. This trend is potentially more difficult to detect, evaluate and correct, especially without astute occupational health input.

The health of the workforce generally in the UK can be considered poor by Western European standards. Successive governments have avoided making course corrections to keep the nation’s health, specifically that of the workforce, resilient and fit for the future. We find ourselves running at the back of the pack and need to take full advantage of initiatives like the UK SCALE Centre to recover a competitive advantage.

We can no longer apply historic attitudes to workforce planning and management – some of this now outdated thinking has been ingrained into senior decision makers and is treated as a constant factor in strategic planning. In fact, it is exactly the opposite currently and foreseeably, workforce factors relevant to planning and execution of work are very dynamic and must not be underestimated.

Any organisation involved in supply chains must ask itself questions about its workforce, recruitment processes and management of staff. Effective leadership should be prepared to uncover both anticipated but unwanted, as well as surprising, information.

It is important to consider the often unintended or unforeseen consequences of senior or executive level decisions on the workplace experience and delivery capacity of workers. Poorly thought-out initiatives risk creating negative factors which adversely affect the desire of staff to remain in post and work at full capacity consistently, as well as potentially increasing the likelihood of sickness absence.

Research by Loughborough University has identified that the UK workforce is facing many health challenges which are the product of missed or avoided course corrections. These health challenges are amplified by the shrinking availability of healthcare provision from the NHS together with the natural effects of an aging population. There does not seem to be a realistic prospect that AI or any form of automation will replace workers in time to avert a real and severe workforce health crisis.

A team of staff standing together in a warehouse.

Supply chains need people. Looking after the people involved at all levels of the many organisations which make up that chain need not be expensive or limit larger organisational and infrastructure projects. In fact, the opposite is true – investing in workforce health enables those projects. A healthy workforce is a more resilient one and enables employers to meet their contractual commitments.

A healthy workforce is also linked to better standards of safety. Everyone should remind themselves that the safety of products and systems in a supply chain can only be assured because the components or services are all made to the requisite standards. Workers who are operating through injury, sickness, strain or excessive fatigue are the most likely element of a process to lead to errors and mistakes.

We shall be heavily dependent on human workforces for many years to come, and yet the workforce stock we have now is not likely to go the distance without some looking after. We can’t just ignore the problem and hope for the best, which is what makes the UK SCALE Centre so fundamentally important, as we look to put people and forward-thinking research back at the heart of supply chain innovation.