Maryland Manufacturing Food Peer Network

What are the legal changes for 2023 that impact HR and HR professionals? In this session, we will share the latest information on 2023 changes, updates and areas to watch for the HR professional. This session includes changes to HR law including FMLA, OSHA, and EEOC, as well as what to look for as an HR professional.

Attracting and retaining talent is difficult in a tight labor market. Every company feels the recruiting pain in some way. How painful it is depends on how well you develop and execute your attraction and retention strategies. Execution is everything when recruiting and retaining; you must do the hard work or hire someone to do it for you.

Effective leadership in manufacturing creates positive change by inspiring and motivating your team and it is the cornerstone of creating a workplace that elevates all aspects of a manufacturing operation. Great leaders support their team, reduce workplace accidents, and improve worker satisfaction. Too often, employees are promoted based on their technical skills over their personal and leadership skills and they are not given the tools to develop into effective leaders. In this session, we will explore why leadership training is important and how to effectively select and train your next leaders.

In this session, we will cover the top HR trends of 2023 including creative attendance policies, employee benefits, wellness and healthy family programs that are proving beneficial in attracting and retaining employees.

There is a growing consensus in the manufacturing community that it is time for the traditional top-down culture to go away. Inspired by the nimbleness of startups, the mindset of millennials and the ongoing need to worker smarter and faster, manufacturers are increasingly shifting to a less rigid environment as a mean of improving culture, increasing employee engagement, and gaining a competitive edge. This session will focus on practical ways to improve company culture and strategies to increase employee engagement.

Maintaining alignment of employee skills with the needs of the business is crucial for success, especially in a fast-changing business environment.  When hiring for new positions, we take great pains to write job descriptions, document requirements of the position, and fully vet any potential candidate against those requirements.  We all agree these steps are an important part of the recruiting process.  But what about current employees.  Businesses are dynamic with ever changing growth opportunities, strategies, organizational changes, etc.  Good businesses have processes around defining the requirements of all positions (skills inventory), assessing employees’ skills (assessments) against the requirements, and identifying areas that need improvement (gap assessments).  When done well, the gap assessments help develop focused and targeted employee development plans aligning employees and managers on what is needed for the employee to succeed. 

This session will focus on understanding what technology and tools are available to support your HR Practice. These tools are the wide range of technological solutions that help organizations manage their day-to-day HR activities effectively. HR processes are compliance-driven and performing them manually is cumbersome, time-consuming, and arduous. HR tools leverage the power of automation allowing HR staff to save time, cut costs, and manage their employees easily. In this session we will discuss the top HR Tools that Maryland manufacturers are utilizing and how they are impacting the business.

The growing skilled labor gap in manufacturing has created a workforce shortage and upskilling and training are now necessary. The important of training workers goes beyond the development of necessary skills but it is also a great motivator and retention tool. As this next generation is looking for more autonomy and development opportunities at work, manufacturers providing on-demand training that allows employees to easily access training at their own pace is providing beneficial to employee morale, company culture and production.