Building Better Workplaces to Attract and Keep Great People

Attracting skilled workers is one challenge. Keeping them is another.

The Springfield Regional Jobs Committee today attended the Queensland Manufacturing Hubs breakfast workshop in Ipswich, focused on helping manufacturing businesses strengthen their approach to attracting and retaining employees.

Hosted by Queensland Manufacturing Hub, with support from the Ipswich Regional Chamber of Commerce and Ipswich City Council, the session brought local manufacturers and business leaders together to explore a question that continues to come up across our region: what makes someone choose one employer over another, and more importantly, what makes them stay?

A key focus of the workshop was the Employee Value Proposition, or EVP. Put simply, it is the combination of culture, opportunity, conditions, leadership, purpose and workplace experience that helps define why someone would want to work for an organisation.

For employers facing ongoing skills shortages, this matters.

Salary will always be part of the equation, but increasingly workers are also looking at career progression, flexibility, workplace culture, job security, training opportunities and whether they feel valued by their employer.

For manufacturing businesses in particular, there is an opportunity to think differently about how jobs and careers are presented.

Many manufacturing businesses offer strong wages, long term careers, highly technical work and pathways into supervision, management and specialist roles. The challenge is making sure potential workers understand those opportunities and that, once recruited, the workplace experience lives up to that promise.

The workshop provided practical tools for businesses to look closely at their own workforce offer and consider where changes could strengthen both recruitment and retention.

These are important conversations for our region.

Employers regularly tell us that finding the right people is difficult, but workforce challenges cannot be solved through recruitment alone. Retention, workplace culture, training and career development all form part of the picture.

For the Springfield Regional Jobs Committee, participating in sessions like this also helps us better understand what local employers are experiencing and where workforce initiatives, partnerships and regional responses can provide practical support.

Strong businesses need strong people, and creating workplaces where people can see a future for themselves is an important part of building a strong regional workforce.