“This will represent a major social challenge for us”

The Fraisa Group is an owner-managed industrial company with annual revenues of CHF 110 million and 550 employees in seven countries. It produces tools for the metal processing industry. The company promotes the provision of advanced or catch-up training to untrained staff. In an interview, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors Josef Maushart explained whether such measures are worth it, as well as the limits he is subject to.

Mr Maushart, how has digitalisation affected your company?

Thanks to new technologies, we have been able to halve production costs within Swiss production locations over the last five years. Having previously invested for a long time abroad, we have now finally been able to expand our operations in Switzerland. Over the next three years, we shall be investing 30 million francs in the expansion of production capacity here in Switzerland. This would not have been possible without highly automated operations. We can now keep our machines running also during the night and at weekends without our staff having to work shifts. That represents a massive breakthrough and makes us more competitive internationally.

Have the demands placed on your staff changed at all with technological progress. How do you deal with this?

The archetypical industrial worker used to be a person who didn’t have any specific training, but was willing to work shifts. Now shift work is on the wane and complexity is increasing due to the use of highly automated systems. We need highly trained staff in order to operate modern industrial machines. This means that the untrained industrial worker has reached his, or her, limits. Now we could simply have replaced these workers with highly trained staff. However, first of all that seemed to us to be morally wrong, and secondly it’s not so easy during times of labour shortages. As a result, we are trying to carry our staff with us along the road towards digitalisation.

How do you do that?

At the start of this process, we were employing 40 untrained workers. To date 22 of them have completed catch-up training courses and received a federal certificate of proficiency – as logistical experts, plant operators or production mechanics. As a result, we’ve been able to keep these people firmly on the payroll. And this has also helped the company by strengthening team spirit. This was brought home to us at the last Swiss Employer Award, where we were chosen as one of the top employers.

How can you be certain that the benefit obtained from these training initiatives exceeds the undoubtedly high costs?

The costs are by no means insignificant. The entire training process costs around 40,000 francs per person. This is because we count study time as working time: employees only work 80%, but continue to receive 100% of their salary in order to avoid cash flow problems. However, we have a long-term investment horizon and believe that these initiatives will be paid for in the form of increased motivation and loyalty on the part of our workforce.

Precisely in the manufacturing industry a lot of companies are experiencing major cost pressures. How should they finance initiatives like these?

In actual fact, the training costs themselves are relatively negligible. And most companies have their own training departments anyway. It’s the full salary compensation, which we operate, that might be a problem for some. In some cases people will have to compromise.

It’s also possible to recruit new staff from abroad or directly from training centres. How could firms be motivated, instead of this, to train up their own workers?

Something like this can’t be forced. Especially smaller businesses are reliant on the State creating new opportunities, such as by expanding catch-up training for adults. In addition, we are already experiencing increasing difficulties in recruiting specialist workers. Over the medium to long term, businesses will therefore end up doing what is most obvious, and train up their own workers.

In some industrial sectors digitalisation and automation are already very advanced. In your view is there still enough time to prepare all workers for the new challenges?

All is a big word – each case is ultimately dependent upon the readiness and willingness of each individual. Technological development is continuously moving forward, so we still have time. But we will have to develop new education policy ideas, in particular for very low skilled workers. This will represent a major social challenge for us. In Switzerland, 300,000 people receive social welfare support. According to a recent study, 50% of them have not completed any vocational training. We have to put in place suitable programmes in order to ensure that these people are qualified for entry into the labour market. Progress also needs to be made in the area of adult education. If this progress cannot be achieved, there is a risk of a paradoxical situation emerging: high unemployment yet massive labour shortages.