Industry Collaboration – Addressing the Warehouse Employee Shortage

The industry is suffering from warehouse labor shortages, with no signs of significant improvement. Amazon is building warehouses across the country at lightning speed, and recent reports estimate the cost to replace a single warehouse employee is a minimum of $8,500. Think of how many employees have left your PDCs in the past year – what is that costing you?

Carlisle proposes to develop an online tool to help individual warehouses better understand where they may be underperforming when it comes to retaining employees. Beyond that, we will provide them with actionable next steps for how to improve on any of those areas. By leveraging learnings and benchmark data across the industry, each warehouse will get a clear picture of their performance compared to others and identify specific steps on how to improve retention.

Phase 1: PDC Diagnostic Dashboard

The objective of the PDC Diagnostic Dashboard is to provide warehouse management with a detailed understanding of how they are performing in key areas related to employee turnover. With the ability to view warehouse employee satisfaction compared to industry averages and to prioritize areas of improvement on a case-by-case basis, this tool aims to combat the critical issue of warehouse labor shortages.

Through this workstream, we will design and develop a PDC-facing tool to be used by warehouse management to identify specific pain points or gaps compared to the industry regarding employee satisfaction. We will develop a syndicated satisfaction survey to pulse PDC employees on key areas known to drive turnover. These surveys, along with NAPB warehouse data, will be key inputs into the tool, providing warehouse management with detailed information on areas they need to improve and how they compare to the industry.

Below provides an illustrative example of how this tool could look and work. Note this is for illustrative purposes only, as the final tool design will depend on needs of the participating group. For additional detail and examples, reach out to Carlisle.

PDC Health Analysis

The PDC Health Analysis Dashboard leverages deep industry knowledge and extensive data to benchmark PDC health against industry averages. Employee satisfaction in key areas (to be determined) are displayed to highlight priority areas needing improvement.

Please note, the above image is for illustrative purposes online and does not reflect the final health components or true data.

Satisfaction Diagnostics

The Satisfaction Diagnostics Dashboard will drill into a deeper level of detail, helping managers understand specific drivers of employee satisfaction (or dissatisfaction).

Turnover Hotspot Analysis

Turnover hotspot analysis analyzes critical areas and factors that are causing employee turnover and assessing overall PDC Satisfaction.

Where will this data be coming from?

Collaboration is decisive in the success of this tool, and we are planning on using a combination of Syndicated Surveys, Benchmark Data, and Syndicated PDC-Level Assessments that will drive the data and information behind this tool. Through collaboration and data, we plan to develop Best Practices Guides (Phase 2) that aim to combat this retention crisis in our industry. Depending on the needs of the group, the workstreams in this proposed tool may change.

Interested?

This project is currently open to our OEM clients, and is expected to kick off in Q2 of 2022. If you are interested in learning more, please reach out through the link at the top of this page.

Authors

Meredith Collins

Director