George's Re-Evaluates Labor Model
Ezra DeVore
Many businesses have developed plans to confront the unique struggles a 2 year pandemic can offer, and George’s has recently undertaken a large effort to lower labor intensity and adequately match the labor force they have.
“Over the last couple years of the COVID-19 pandemic,” states George’s Complex HR Manager Lawson Bresette. “We were seeing an increase in absenteeism, and folks not being interested in job opportunities."
“There are many job openings, but not a lot of job-seekers right now.
“We were seeing some writing on the wall saying that this may become a more permanent situation.
“So, we wanted to take a look at our business model here in Cassville, and how it supports the overall business model of George’s, realizing that staffing was always going to be a problem moving forward, because we were about 130 in the hole.
“Here in this facility (the Barry County branch), we’re looking at about 673 general production team members, not including general support and management departments; fully staffed is about 859.
“Now, however, we are slightly over-staffed on day shift and slightly understaffed on night shift due to our changeover, just because the work that we have changed to is less labor intensive.
“It was a way to reduce our headcount without having to lay anybody off, only reducing the labor, so we can get done what we need to get done with the labor we already have.
“Number two, we also changed the processes a great deal. Some areas go increasingly easier, some remained the same, some marginally increased in difficulty. That’s what we’ve been getting used to over the past couple weeks.
“One of the main reasons why is that we were able to increase the size of our bird.
“We went from a 2 - 3.5 pound bird, to a 5 or 6 pound bird. So, it’s a heavier bird, so that opens more markets for us. The breast meat is larger on that, so it’s more conducive to deboning, or selling it off in breast-meat cutlets or something similar. For example, if a restaurant wanted their cost per plate to be the same and manageable, we would debone the product, make it their specified size, and send it off to a retailer who provides that to restaurants. So that’s part of our business model.
“We also conduct business with many large retailers, but now that our bird size has bigger, it’s allowed us to maximize our business with current clients - take our current birds, and the end product has more to offer. In essence, we took the labor we had, and took out all our labor intensive jobs to facilitate the smaller staff. The first year and some change of Covid stayed the same, because we were paying more for the people we could find, but it got to a point, maybe 10 or 12 months ago, where we were really seeing not a lot of available applicants.
“It was a plus on the backside of this rebuild that we were able to stablize our staffing.”
George’s works with many large scale companies, though with short staffing, it became difficult to facilitate the orders, however, a plan was made.
“We’ve taken much of the business our company did,” Bresette continued, “and moved it to our Virginia teams. They’ve absorbed the orders there, so we didn’t lose any business. We packed up some additional business by way of our changeover here, and the return on our investment has been good enough to make it worth it.
“Where we mostly had fast food clients before, that has decreased, and we mostly provide more than we used to of wholesale product to wholesale food vendors now.”
George’s has largely addressed the labor shortages with automation, eliminating the need for cramped spaces and opening up previously tight areas. Corridors where multiple people would be operating heavy machinery is now open, due to those jobs being placed in more efficient regions of the building, or simply done with automation.
Therefore, with the help of automation to address labor shortages, and reduce stressful jobs, strategies to confront the pandemic evolve and grow with the times themselves.
"We already had above average ergonomics, but now we’ve improved even further. A lot of that is due to the new space we’ve created on the production floor, by way of our remodel. It gives folks more space to move around and get their jobs done efficiently and effectively. We didn’t kick anybody out with this automation of work, but the automation did help with our headcount.”
Many businesses have developed plans to confront the unique struggles a 2 year pandemic can offer, and George’s has recently undertaken a large effort to lower labor intensity and adequately match the labor force they have.
“Over the last couple years of the COVID-19 pandemic,” states George’s Complex HR Manager Lawson Bresette. “We were seeing an increase in absenteeism, and folks not being interested in job opportunities."
“There are many job openings, but not a lot of job-seekers right now.
“We were seeing some writing on the wall saying that this may become a more permanent situation.
“So, we wanted to take a look at our business model here in Cassville, and how it supports the overall business model of George’s, realizing that staffing was always going to be a problem moving forward, because we were about 130 in the hole.
“Here in this facility (the Barry County branch), we’re looking at about 673 general production team members, not including general support and management departments; fully staffed is about 859.
“Now, however, we are slightly over-staffed on day shift and slightly understaffed on night shift due to our changeover, just because the work that we have changed to is less labor intensive.
“It was a way to reduce our headcount without having to lay anybody off, only reducing the labor, so we can get done what we need to get done with the labor we already have.
“Number two, we also changed the processes a great deal. Some areas go increasingly easier, some remained the same, some marginally increased in difficulty. That’s what we’ve been getting used to over the past couple weeks.
“One of the main reasons why is that we were able to increase the size of our bird.
“We went from a 2 - 3.5 pound bird, to a 5 or 6 pound bird. So, it’s a heavier bird, so that opens more markets for us. The breast meat is larger on that, so it’s more conducive to deboning, or selling it off in breast-meat cutlets or something similar. For example, if a restaurant wanted their cost per plate to be the same and manageable, we would debone the product, make it their specified size, and send it off to a retailer who provides that to restaurants. So that’s part of our business model.
“We also conduct business with many large retailers, but now that our bird size has bigger, it’s allowed us to maximize our business with current clients - take our current birds, and the end product has more to offer. In essence, we took the labor we had, and took out all our labor intensive jobs to facilitate the smaller staff. The first year and some change of Covid stayed the same, because we were paying more for the people we could find, but it got to a point, maybe 10 or 12 months ago, where we were really seeing not a lot of available applicants.
“It was a plus on the backside of this rebuild that we were able to stablize our staffing.”
George’s works with many large scale companies, though with short staffing, it became difficult to facilitate the orders, however, a plan was made.
“We’ve taken much of the business our company did,” Bresette continued, “and moved it to our Virginia teams. They’ve absorbed the orders there, so we didn’t lose any business. We packed up some additional business by way of our changeover here, and the return on our investment has been good enough to make it worth it.
“Where we mostly had fast food clients before, that has decreased, and we mostly provide more than we used to of wholesale product to wholesale food vendors now.”
George’s has largely addressed the labor shortages with automation, eliminating the need for cramped spaces and opening up previously tight areas. Corridors where multiple people would be operating heavy machinery is now open, due to those jobs being placed in more efficient regions of the building, or simply done with automation.
Therefore, with the help of automation to address labor shortages, and reduce stressful jobs, strategies to confront the pandemic evolve and grow with the times themselves.
"We already had above average ergonomics, but now we’ve improved even further. A lot of that is due to the new space we’ve created on the production floor, by way of our remodel. It gives folks more space to move around and get their jobs done efficiently and effectively. We didn’t kick anybody out with this automation of work, but the automation did help with our headcount.”
