The Labour Struggle Is Real

By Planit Canada President Peter Mate

The struggle is real and it’s not going away. Labour shortages have been elevated to new heights during Covid, but the challenges were there before and they’re not going away anytime soon. The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) released a study recently titled “How to Adapt to the Labour Shortage Situation”. It’s a great resource.

It states that 64% of Canadian businesses are reporting that the labour shortage is limiting their growth. It uncovers that the real problem is an aging workforce that is directly related to a declining available labour force. The pandemic amplified the situation, but this started some 20 years ago.

Over half of all Canadian companies are struggling to hire workers leaving positions vacant for three to four months. The problem seems to be across all provinces almost equally and very similar in all industries.

The same study does offer information and facts to help navigate the labour shortage. Technology is the highest return. Adopting more technology to automate repetitive or repeatable tasks enables twice as much success in the hiring of new employees and almost twice as much chance for those businesses to see higher than average growth. No other solution comes close to having as much of an impact.

Canadian manufacturing companies that have adopted technology and automation have found it twice as easy to hire new employees. That’s staggering. The results of the study are very clear. Technology is our best resource to enable us to be able to grow our businesses.

At Planit Canada, we focus on technology that helps streamline and accelerate the manufacturing process. This might explain the explosive growth we’ve been seeing in recent years. Canadian manufacturers have been flocking to software to assist them to do more with the people they have. If we’re limited by how many workers we can hire and retain, we have to ensure we enable those workers to be as efficient as possible.

The software we offer is geared towards doing more with the people you have. We accelerate the selling stage, reduce manual tasks, increase quality, reduce re-work and leverage technology to automate as much of the process as we can. In a sense, technology is the strongest superpower we have that enables us to grow in spite of the labour challenges.