Episode #33: Redefining Flexibility in U.S. Manufacturing with Nirit Cohen
This episode of U.S. Manufacturing Today, powered by Veryable, delves into the challenges and future of the American manufacturing workforce with guest Nirit Cohen. Cohen, a thought leader and Forbes contributor, discusses the evolution of hourly and shift work, the impact of COVID-19 on work models, and the growing demand for workplace flexibility. The conversation addresses how manufacturers can adapt to these changes, the role of AI and automation, and strategies for attracting and retaining a diverse talent pool. Cohen emphasizes the importance of breaking traditional molds, piloting flexible work models, and understanding the unique needs of the modern workforce.
Links
- Nirit on LinkedIn
- Nirit on Forbes
- Nirit's Website
- Nirit's Substack
- Navigating Trump 2.0
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
- Veryable Shop
- Blog: How Veryable Is Revitalizing Talent Acquisition & Retention
Timestamps
- 00:00 Introduction to U.S. Manufacturing Today
- 00:16 The Changing Expectations of Hourly Workers
- 00:36 Interview with Nirit Cohen: Flexible Work for Shift Jobs
- 02:36 The Gig Economy in Manufacturing
- 05:30 Adapting to Workforce Flexibility
- 18:39 The Role of AI and Technology in Manufacturing
- 23:57 Reindustrialization and Reshoring in the U.S.
- 27:55 Advice for Manufacturing Leaders and Workers
- 34:08 Conclusion and Resources
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: [00:00:00] Welcome back to US Manufacturing today. The podcast powered by Veryable where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers, shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of manufacturing, the changing landscape policies, and more.
Today we're examining a frontline challenge in U.S. manufacturing, not just machines or tariffs, but people and the way they work. The hourly worker on a shift line, a warehouse rack picker or. Process tech in a plant, their expectations have changed. And if American manufacturing is going to rebuild, it must adapt to a workforce that expects flexibility, purpose, and control.
Our guest, Nirit Cohen, is a thought leader in this space. She helped forecast how flexible schedules, multiple roles and digital platforms would redefine hourly work. She's a Forbes contributor and wrote earlier this year that flexible work is coming for shift jobs and hourly workers in a great column on Forbes, Nirit, welcome to U.S. Manufacturing Today.
Nirit Cohen: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
Matt Horine: Great. We're excited to [00:01:00] have you, and I think we'll just jump right into it. You've built a career and alot of your content about the future of work with a focus on hourly and shift coming into the forefront. Can you start by telling us how you came to focus on this segment rather than just white collar work or traditional white collar work?
Nirit Cohen: So, it's a really good question, an interesting story. I actually wrote a column in the paper. I've. Future of work column in the paper is in some way or other 10 years already. So that's a long time. And at one time you have an editor, right? So I got blamed for talking about just the people in the, in the knowledge industry.
So I didn't set out intentionally to go look for that couldn't be true. And so what am I missing? What am I misinterpreting or not writing about, or not shining light on? I discovered as suspected, it's not just about knowledge industry and this is pre COVID, right? And then COVID actually made that even more confusing because we confused future of work with work from home.
And [00:02:00] then we said that's not relevant for people who cannot work remotely. Again, that's not true. So I've been on this soapbox of the world of work is changing for a lot of reasons and it's touching everyone, even if you don't think it is.
Matt Horine: It's a really good point. I remember back during the pandemic years, you would see aggregated LinkedIn articles about the future of work and conflating that with just work from home, which was in the moment what appears to be a very temporary thing with return to office.
Some people never left the office, which is I think a segment that you highlighted here in the article. You state the terms like gig and other types of employment, words like that are increasingly relevant to hourly work. What do these terms mean in a manufacturing or industrial context?
Nirit Cohen: Yeah, so the gig economy, and I actually don't like that word because it misinterprets it into a gig, which is like this fleeting anecdotal work and which I don't think we're talking about.
The gig economy really evolved a platform [00:03:00] economy, which enables you to connect tasks to people and exchange value in ways that are different from your standard salaried employee contract. So. You had suddenly a cloud of humans out there who were available to do tasks and work broke down from jobs to tasks and found each other, right.
And I think as we've seen this is this is now going on getting almost under the second decade of this platform process in place, and we're seeing an evolution and it's actually climbing up the value chain. So this ability to say, I need this done. Where are the people and who are they that can get this done for me?
And they're not necessarily in my building, in my time zone, in my employ. And so I think that's what, to me, we're seeing happen. And then the, and then when you keep going with that, you see the further evolution. Because if people could start working through the [00:04:00] gig economy or the platform or independent economy, suddenly they had choices.
So if in the past the only thing they could do is the work that's in the vicinity of where they live, and then suddenly they could, and we saw this again in COVID, right? If you look at the amount of people that started working in warehouses or started working in just shipping, right? So driving around, delivering parcels, right?
So this idea that I have options. And, uh, therefore I'm not fully dependent on that one job by that one employer. That seems to be in my area.
Matt Horine: I'm really thinking back, it seems like it was just yesterday, it's, guess it's been five years ago since a lot of that went on. We've talked with a lot of guests who say it was this perpetual timeframe from 2020 where we had this jump, but it really was a changing moment where people.
The reaction to the stability perhaps is how people would define past industrial roles is that it was every workplace was independent, things were happening, the closures were happening, or [00:05:00] people said, how do I unlock not just the way that I work, but my potential and manufacturing historically has relied on fixed shifts, defined hours, and that stability mindset.
And now you know, again, what you've highlighted, many workers who are holding multiple different task related roles. If they want more work because they want more choice On LinkedIn, you mentioned about 5% of hourly workers now hold multiple, what we would consider classic jobs. How should manufacturers interpret that?
Is there a different mindset from the manufacturer's point of view?
Nirit Cohen: So to me it's understanding and it goes back to future of work and flexibility does not work, work from home. It doesn't have anything to do in, in manufacturing case. It's not about where people work. It's what they define as the kind of flexibility they need.
So in the old days you said these are the shift, this is the structure. It was take it or leave it. And if you had an issue, it was up to you to whether you could swap with someone or your employer, like drop a shift, but it was a take it or leave [00:06:00] it system. And what we saw is when people started realizing they had alternatives, they basically said, okay, you know what?
I can work a full-time job, but I can create it out of three. Part-time flexible gigs, which are not really gigs because they're ongoing and suddenly, if I'm a young mother and I wanna be home when my kids come home from school, it's possible because I can schedule it into my schedule. If I'm studying, if I have an exam period, I can, I can decide that this is period, this is a period where I work or I don't work.
I think what happened was. They went back and negotiated that with their employers again, when I have options, I can come to you and say, look, I'm Matt. I really like working for you. I wanna keep working for you, but this Tuesday thing doesn't work for me and you have to let me have the flexibility. And if you say no, that's take it or leave it, I'll quit because I have options and.
The third person quits and the fourth person quits. He said, maybe I could figure out a way to not to let them choose their own [00:07:00] shift or to let them take left shifts if they want, or to let them work shorter shifts so people started negotiating what they needed because they had options externally. That redesigned structures internally.
Matt Horine: That's a really important point because manufacturing love it or hate it is often very rigid. It's probably what gets the job done, but sometimes that mindset is also, it's not thinking about the future. And it sounds like that may be the biggest misalignment between manufacturing employers today and this new class of worker that is seeking flexibility overall
Nirit Cohen: and understanding that doesn't mean that they're not committed.
And it doesn't mean that they don't take their work seriously. We tend to use these adjectives to describe the people that have requirements that are different than us because we worked our way through a different system, but they live in different times and their career is different. And frankly, they know that their employability no longer depends on.
If their profession or their [00:08:00] employer, even if they're the best employer in the world, but that there's no, that's not what's going to define their employability over their lifetime. They need to be able to stay employable. And so they're looking all the time at, how do I make sure they also. Know what I will be doing in a couple years and when they hear something new, they go after it.
Matt Horine: That makes a lot of sense. I wanna jump back to something that you mentioned right at the top of the show because of the mindset of what we call like knowledge workers and the remote hybrid type roles, but in shift jobs like manufacturing, logistic. Those types of things. How does that flexible shift model mirror that you micro shifts, rotating pools?
We work a lot on it at Veryable because we're very much a part of the manufacturing space. What other platforms and technologies do you see that enable that new type of shift work where people are looking for flexibility, where employers have bought into the mindset of, Hey, we can really capture this and get value out of it?
Nirit Cohen: Flexibility has defined [00:09:00] a lot. A lot of times it's really defined by the person's ability to control the things, the variables that are important to them, right? So once you have a system that allows you to sign into shifts, right? Or even the definition of what's a shift? Does it have to start and end at the time that we determine it?
Is it as long as we determine it? So the idea of micro shifts, which is shorter shifts, right? The idea of being able to choose your shift. To start and end in different hours. And frankly, when you get away from that rigid kind of structure mentality, you think about this from the employer perspective, it makes a ton of sense because you could technically understand that you have peak hours or you have hours or people get tired and so they're not doing as well, right?
You bring in, you bring in a group people, that's the beginning of their shift, and suddenly you've got fresh perspectives in there. You are, if you have peak hours in terms of you're servicing some industry that you know, where you [00:10:00] have a period where you need suddenly more, more people, you don't need to increase your workforce to standard full-time employment.
You can bring in people and they might be willing to work for you and. They wouldn't come to work for you full-time, but they will come to work for you if your shifts are redefined or if your period, you've got people going on retirement that are happy to stay in for maybe a shift or two. You've got people in between jobs that are happy to come do some work.
You've got all sorts of reasons why people would be willing to buy into work. Isn't your standard full-time if you gave them the flexibility that they need. And once you understand that flexibility is not necessarily where or when it's, but it's really about what is important to you, you have that conversation and you figure out how to bring the person on board.
Matt Horine: That's a really great point. I think a lot about a lot of the profiles of operators we see on our platform, and I think there's about a million different ways. You can cut that out. There are [00:11:00] retirees who may just want to be, remain engaged in the workforce in some way and earn a little extra income.
We've seen veterans, we've seen students, we've seen people who are trying to upskill themselves work these type of what we call ops, but like a micro shift or a. That's in in tune with somebody's demand cycle or business, and they learn something on the job. And you can see that upskill and that uplift.
That's the type of pressure that has been applied in the workforce, and now it's a counterbalance because now that's what the workforce has come to expect. So people are figuring out ways to capture that. And I think with labor shortages or the quote unquote labor shortages, I think it's much more about labor access.
Supply chain disruptions that are all too common over the past half decade at a minimum. And the reshoring initiatives that we see underway, the workforce pressure. How do policy and training programs adapt to support that type of flexible on demand model that's sustainable? And you mentioned we're in our second decade of this, this model.
Is there anything that there should be focused on from the [00:12:00] policy side to maybe support that and lift that up?
Nirit Cohen: Yes. Though, I will say that I think usually people adapt faster than organizations, and organizations will adapt faster than policy and social system. So I think people have adapted, they're asking for things that at this point it's even the organization still need to figure out how to adapt, right?
So policy's a big leap, but I do believe that this idea. It doesn't matter the form of employment. It doesn't matter if you're a salaried employer at 10 99, it shouldn't matter. You need to be able to get some sort of social safety net. Regardless of how you work, and we saw that play out in COVID by the way, because in COVID we suddenly saw people get, be benefits were created, and a lot of countries around the world, social benefits were created.
Social protection systems that weren't there by the way. They didn't necessarily last, but [00:13:00] you got these things regardless of your kind of employment, because we were in this extreme situation, I think ultimately. It shouldn't matter. We spend way too much today talking about whether it's a salaried employee or not, and so step away from the U.S. for a second and go look at some European countries where the social system is, you're a citizen, you get medical care.
Okay, then it doesn't matter if you're, if you, if I work for you as a salaried employer, if I work for you on a 10 99 system that's more flexible, I get medical care. It's the same medical care. So I think the more we bring in the ability to say, here's what you get as an citizen of this country in terms of protection, and then you work and work as an exchange of value for pay.
Then it will be easier to evolve flexibility to the next level.
Matt Horine: That makes a lot of sense. I think that another thing, and we talk a lot about [00:14:00] this show about. The generational shift, especially with Gen Z. It's a funny thing to say because they were just up and coming in the workforce a few years ago, and now they're really in their primary zone.
One thing that has become apparent to me is that some mistakes employers make when they try to offer flexibility, but in some cases they might mean more work or like more kind of control. How can companies avoid taking workloads and trying to cross load it onto this more flexible model where people are.
They have that social net safety net you were talking about, but also has the workload increased for people in any capacity in this kind of new system?
Nirit Cohen: So one of the things that we probably are figuring out how to do these days is to, is how do you define and measure success? So in the old days when work was a place you went to, right?
And then if you think about it, a salary to employees gets paid for showing up in the morning, clocking in. They're not getting paid [00:15:00] for what they do once they clocked in. And so this idea that we measure people for, for the value they create, right? And that's what we are able to measure them on and then compensate them for.
It allows you to rethink. Does it matter when I create this value? Now, if you wanna talk about manufacturing it, it might matter because you, if you need to staff machines to run an operating system, then it, then you do need buts in seats during certain hours all the time. For example, if you think about an idea where, um, there are certain hours of the day where everybody's happy to work and certain hours of the day where nobody wants to work, and you can start, um, offering Veryable pay and you say, okay, you know what?
My shift pay is structured in the way where if you actually sign in for a shift that nobody wants, I'm gonna pay you more. And if you're signing in for a shift that a lot of people want, then there's a difference in, in how I deal [00:16:00] with it. You create other incentive systems to actually go build. You're full-time butts in seats, but there no longer need to be people in standard shifts working full-time.
Matt Horine: That is a really good way of looking at it because often you are, you just paid for the time instead of like the productivity. And we, it's easy to talk about in manufacturing because a lot of the KPIs and the ways that success is measured is meeting those KPIs on a daily basis where the salaried and the full-time worker.
More traditional, I guess lack of better way to phrase it, like an office type job. I'm not a fan of the white collar blue, but collar dynamic and what has happened over the past couple years is there, there's been this conflation with remote, or not necessarily flexibility where people, what value are they creating?
And so that is a question because that's impacted the, the remote work concept saying it's not this traditional structure, which is totally different. Flexible work and ways that address it and tackle productivity.
Nirit Cohen: Yes, and, and some of the [00:17:00] arguments around remote work is because we don't know how to measure what you've delivered.
If you go back to the office work or the, I call it knowledge work, right? We define knowledge work as people who work over 50% of their time through a screen. Technically speaking, if I can work from a screen, then it doesn't matter where this screen sits, right? So what if I come into the office and frankly, again, in COVID and I look at the manufacturing space, right?
We learned that if you need to have hands on a, on a equipment, that doesn't necessarily mean that the person guiding those hands needs to sit in the office. Because when we really had to create social distancing, we learned to create different kind of roles and maybe have people. Working remotely, guiding the people who were in, minimizing the people who were not working remotely.
So we had all sorts of learnings in that process. Right now, again, to me, remote isn't the thing, but it's the interesting question. What is it that people need to do and where do they need to do it and [00:18:00] when do they need to do it? 'cause again, flexibility is a lot of things. And if I'm happy to come work from 5:00 AM to 2:00 PM do you care?
Maybe the answer is yes, but have you even stopped to question first?
Matt Horine: And a lot of people maybe have not because there is still that paradigm. I think about it often of just presence in the office. There's a lot of intangibles out of that, right? It, it's old school where people, you see you doing work using air quotes here, but what kind of productivity and impact are you having where somebody who may not be present may be doing the same thing, could be 10 times more effective just from a different office or from a different location.
Along with that, there's a lot of, there's a lot of buzz and we've talked a lot about a lot of it on our show about AI automation, frontline work. You've written about ai, some of these scheduling platforms and other things that are reshaping the work structure in the context of the shop floor. How can manufacturers implement these tools without replacing [00:19:00] workers and instead elevating roles?
And we've seen it start to play out now where it's much more of an elevation tool than a replacement. I think. We've dispelled a lot of the myth that it's gonna do away with a lot of jobs or traditional jobs. What's the biggest impact you're seeing from AI right now?
Nirit Cohen: So, first of all, this is really early days, and I think one of the really, maybe good news, 'cause you talked about Gen Z, right, is you bring in younger people and they expect technology, they expect the space to be tech enabled, and they expect their tools to be good.
In fact, they might even help you bring in the tools you didn't know you needed. Right? So this idea that right now we're learning and we're exploring and we don't know where it'll take us, but definitely need to understand what it is that's driving whatever area you're in, whatever profession you're in, whatever space you're dealing with.
And that means making time for it making. Because the biggest [00:20:00] challenge right now is we all grew up in a, in an education environment where there's a right answer, the teacher knows the right answer. They will give us the right answer, we will memorize it. And if we get it right on the test, we'll get an A.
There is no right answer and everybody's looking for the script. There is no script. The problem is there's a learning curve. That takes time. So there's either you, you ignore it and you say, okay, this isn't about me. I'm not, I'm, this isn't knowledge work here. We're doing manufacturing, so this isn't about me, which I seriously doubt anybody at this point is thinking, right?
Because we're all benefiting from the data and we're learning about it. But I think it's gonna take us time to understand where it hits mainstream. Where it stops being on the outskirts of maybe the work. Okay. Yeah. I get my emails written better and faster and maybe cleaner, but that's not the interesting portion.
So the question is, what is that mainstream for you? Do you have the people who can figure it out? [00:21:00] Are you incentivizing them to figure it out? Because if you're measuring them on a day job, they won't have time to go climb that learning curve. Then somebody else might figure out a way to do what you're doing much cheaper, faster, and easier.
And then the fear element at the personal level, right? If you go in saying, okay, I'm bringing in AI, and by the time this is all in, you're all fired and you're on your own. I, some of the leaders have been almost quoted saying that, right? So on the one hand, yes, you have to tell people you need to get on this bandwagon and figure it out, and it's too fast and we can't teach you everything.
On the other hand, if I am really on my own, why, why bother? And you might say, if you don't, you will get fired and not find a job. But I think there's a, I think we're still finding our middle ground here. I don't think we know where this is going. I'm not sure we know. Which it'll reshape jobs, but I'm not sure we understand fully.
Will the people that are left without jobs be able to [00:22:00] find alternatives or will there be this period where a whole bunch of people no longer have something to do and the people that have jobs in are in demand have skills that not many people have? I don't know where we'll land on this. We always quote in these stories, the, in fact, a manufacturing story, right?
When we put the machines into, in England, in the beginning of the 19 hundreds actually for garments, right? So a whole bunch of people got fired and yet we didn't have closets and we didn't have washing machines, and we didn't have all the fashion industry, right? And so they could work back in those when those were created.
In the middle, they had no job.
Matt Horine: That's a really good point because I think it highlights one, there's a lot of buzz around it, but also it has that overarching kind of looming feeling like I'm going to lose my role or my capacity to some type of AI where this theory of efficiency over discernment is what I would call it, like the discernment of deciding what creates value and just handing that and [00:23:00] handing it over to.
AI has been an easy buzzword thing to talk about. I heard earlier this week, or maybe it was last week, the CEO of Starbucks saying, we're all in on ai. What does that mean for Starbucks? That's something that's
Nirit Cohen: Yeah, that's a really good question. I, because, yeah, because you're not going to get your coffee from an ai, but if they figure out a way to know what you want and have it ready for you without you needing to stand in line.
And frankly, it's an interesting question because isn't part of the Starbucks experience, which you do when you do stand in line, so it's in, these are all things we need to go figure out.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's a really, that's a really good way to put it. 'cause part of my Starbucks experience is finding out how I can not stand in line.
So that's, uh. I do the mobile order or order ahead just because of the line function. That's a great point. Because people expect different things.
Nirit Cohen: Yeah. So maybe your AI agent will ask you when they know you woke up because you've moved your cell phone or something that you know whether you want your usual.
Matt Horine: I think one other big thing that we talk about on this show [00:24:00] is reindustrialization and reshoring in the U.S. specifically. So we're in this environment now, this kind of trade environment where there's this big push for reciprocal trade agreements. These are obviously policy decisions. That change on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and from administration to administration.
But if we're looking at from the outside looking in at U.S. manufacturing and what role the frontline workforce flexibility plays, how much of do you see that as the key to success for any type of reassuring movement or bringing production capacity to the United States?
Nirit Cohen: Previous conversation with ai, right.
Part of the interesting conversation that's happening these days is what's left for us humans to do? Because machines replaced working hands, and now we got technology replacing working minds. And I think when they put that technology back in physical machines, it will do a good job of replacing a lot of us.
And so there's this thinking that says, okay, but there's no, there's nothing left for us to do, and I don't believe that. [00:25:00] I think the thing that makes you, whether as an individual or as a company, has a lot of nuances that have to do with the people working and the things like. Culture and other elements that we have never needed to spend time, too much time understanding because it was, it just, it came in with the working hands in the thinking mind.
And if you take out the working hands in the thinking mind and everyone becomes technology, whether it's AI or a robot. Won't you just be exactly like your competitors and we'll all be wearing white t-shirts and drinking vanilla, right? So then you start bringing in the humans back and you ask, so where do you really need that extra edge that makes you and makes you different from your competitor?
I'm linking that to your question on geography because the next thing that's happening is what do you teach people? Because we used to teach them the things they needed to know to be working hands and thinking minds, and now we need to start teaching them maybe back to being just. [00:26:00] People, whether it's people and my interactions or or value or whatever it is that people bring into your process.
And I think once you do that, you start looking at who are the people that I need to make me and to do what I need to do? And when you start thinking about it that way, it becomes what makes an American manufacturing plant different than a Chinese manufacturing plant. And I grew up at Intel and we had copy exactly.
So it doesn't matter where you are in the world, you had exactly the same process. And I, in fact, I don't even think that was true because there was always that edge that made the same manufacturing plant in a different country. But there was something that was better and there was something that was worse.
And it was always about the culture and the people. That extra thing that we don't know how to measure. So I think this whole idea of looking at the resources and your space, and I'm completely ignoring one government and the other government, [00:27:00] but in the essence of it is you know who you are. Who do you stand for?
What does that mean to you, and how does that going to give you an edge? How's it gonna give you an edge with people because you want them to come work for you? And how is it gonna give you an edge with your customers?
Matt Horine: Really insightful because a lot of. What's talked about is the benefit to country a, country B, or some type of reciprocity and trade agreements.
And it will never be flatly equal because China does things that America's not willing to do and vice versa. And I use those two 'cause they're the most talked about. It could be any country a b. The difference being so foundational in how do we do what we do, not us versus them, or some type of takeaway where it's something about labor arbitrage, which is what we've talked a lot about before, that we're all on equal footing and in the future, how does, how do countries compete and when I think that kind of goes to leadership as well for manufacturing firms.
What is your message to a manufacturing CEO or a COO [00:28:00] who says, we can't. Flex like this. We do production lines, we have fixed structures. We know what we're doing. We just have to hammer this into our system and make it work the way that it used to.
Nirit Cohen: We teach in management courses. This idea that there's the things you don't know, you don't know, right?
We've all familiar with that. I think in this day and age, which you wanna look at are the things you don't know, which are all those reactions we have or. Set ways or that clear map that you're holding onto that got you here, right? I mean it's valid 'cause it got us here, but this question about whether your experiences of value right now or it's actually getting in your way and whether the things that you know, you know that are true, whether they are still true.
So since I think that's interesting and difficult. [00:29:00] I think these days a leader wants to ask more questions than answers and make sure they're not asking the seven, the same seven people on their staff that they're used to talking to. Nothing new ever comes from talking to the same people all the time.
I would actually say make sure you interact with people that are relevant to what you're trying to do, but all the way down to entry level. Staff and young people coming in. The people who are asking, why do we do it this way and why can't I do this? Getting told they can't. Right. So the thing about CEOs is that by the time they see a presentation, 50 people said no to a lot of stuff and very little made it on those slides.
And you actually wanna figure out during these days how to get down to the things that got left on the editing floor. Um, that never made it up to you because we just, we say no because of [00:30:00] that automatic response of the things that we hold to be true. That are maybe no longer true.
Matt Horine: That makes me go back and think about how many times something that I proposed in my career never made it past the next floor or vice versa.
Something I could have learned. Something really important the other direction. So it's really insightful. If you could give one actionable, and we're asking for a a lot of advice here, but if you could give one actionable change for manufacturing firms specifically to implement this quarter, 'cause we're in fourth quarter, that's a big time of year for a lot of them.
One actionable thing that they could do to start adapting to this flexible structure, what would it be?
Nirit Cohen: I believe your talent pool, your potential talent pool, is a lot bigger than what you're seeing because there are a lot of people out there that will not fit into the mold that you've created. Whether it's your shift hours, your shift structure, the way you think about how you employ people and.[00:31:00]
Just the ability to stop for a second and break that down and say, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring in levels of flexibility and allow some of that and see what happens. I like pilots because pilots allow me to try something out and then I know I've succeeded when five people say, why can't I have this right?
And I know I've failed when the person who got it comes back and says, don't want anymore. So actually trying to say, okay, take the least risky area right. Or the most, the manager in your organization that really wants to try things and kept, keeps getting told they can't. Right? Call it a pilot and let them go break things.
And I get that it's difficult, but sometimes if you're doing it in a pilot mode, you don't need a full fledged system, right? So go break the mold, hire people the way they wanna get hired and see who you can tap into. And I think you'll discover. That you can employ a lot more people that are not coming in your [00:32:00] doors today, and they might actually be better than what you're getting in terms of the fit.
Matt Horine: It's a great way of looking at it beyond your line of sight to really what kind of the four walls and looking beyond that and how the world's changing around them. Something else that I think you are pretty unique in that you have taken the vantage point. Talked about this hourly worker or somebody who works in this flexible capacity.
We talk a lot about what should the C-suite do? What should the company do? What should these organizations do? But for the hourly worker that's listening, what new opportunity or mindset should they adopt to succeed in this evolving workforce or involving? And it's evolving not only in manufacturing, but beyond that.
I think you've highlighted that well in the past.
Nirit Cohen: I think that you should ask for more of what you need. So get specific. So I think a, a lot of times companies don't even see that they can offer you something. So we quit, right? I can't do this anymore. I'm gonna, I'm quit. I quit. And then [00:33:00] we only think to renegotiate when we're trying to find a new job.
And actually we saw that post COVID, we had the great resignation, then we had the great reshuffle and the great reshuffle. People asked for things and they weren't more money. But they wanted more of control over things like shift or even, I don't want my manager to yell at me, even things like that, right?
I'm gonna do fries and McDonald's. I know what the pay is, I know what McDonald's is, I know what fries is. The only thing I want is I'm, I won't take a manager yelling at me. And we saw that. And that changes how we know we build work internally. I think that what we should learn how to do. Is to say, this is what I need and here's why I think you can give this to me.
I also do believe that people don't ask for things organizations can't work with, but too many times we just assume. We assume we can't ask and therefore we act on that assumption. I think we should learn to say, here's what I need and here's why I think it can work, and [00:34:00] see what happens.
Matt Horine: Great advice. I think back to any time that I wanted something different, you have to ask first, right?
Nobody can read your mind. Great perspective from the workers' standpoint. Where can our listeners follow your work? Learn more about what you're doing and connect with you.
Nirit Cohen: So I write a weekly substack thought letter, so you're have. Welcome to look me up on Substack, or obviously on LinkedIn. You can find all the links to my Substack content in my Forbes column.
Matt Horine: Excellent. Nirit, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a great conversation.
Nirit Cohen: Thank you for having me. Enjoyed it very much.
Matt Horine: It was a great message that I think meets the moment. To stay ahead of the curve and to help plan your strategy, please check out our [00:26:00] website at www.veryableops.com and under the resources section titled Trump 2.0, where you can see the framework around upcoming policies and how it will impact you and your business. If you're on socials, give us a follow on LinkedIn, X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please feel free to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and leave us a rating and don't forget to subscribe. Thank you again for joining us and learning more about how you can make your way.