How Is Industry Morale?

If I was to try and gauge the mood and morale of the industry right now, I guess I would use the word “strained”. I try and keep an ear to the ground, speak to the right people, observe the general tone of the conversation going on. And from what I can see, all is not well.

That’s not to say business is poor. I think generally the industry is doing pretty well so far this year. Business seems to be brisk in most parts, with all the suppliers we use up on their comparative figures from the year before.

No. I believe morale is low because of the extra business we’re all now doing.

More, by less

This is the way I see it. The industry downsized across the board when the Great Recession came. Installers, fabricators and syscos all shed staff to help keep their businesses afloat. Some failed. Some didn’t, but were much smaller in size when they came out the other side.

Then the recovery came. Home owners started buying windows and doors again in pretty decent numbers. And it wasn’t too long before some companies were reporting record years. Not too shabby. Especially when you can still see the scars of that Great Recession even today. But the problem is, those very same companies probably aren’t back to pre-recession levels of staffing. That means the same, or even more business being done, by less people. It keeps the company margins healthy. It also really starts to piss off the people doing to hard graft.

Some companies are starting to expand. I see plenty of new vacancies going through DGB Jobs. But that is just a handful in an industry of over 14,000 companies. So no real true gauge as to the state of recruitment in the sector. However, from what I can gleam from conversation and being a quiet fly on the wall, we’re still not at pre-recession levels of staff.

Eventually, this leads to an over-worked, strained, stressed and depressed workforce. The very people making and installing our products. That leads us to a dangerous situation where customer service and product quality to home owners has begun to go south fairly drastically.

Low morale hitting the industry?

I’ll be honest, my passion for the job at the moment is waning. I work in our family run business. My job is solid, more solid than most. The pay is good and my future is generally secure. Despite this, being an installer at this moment in time is a bit of a grind. Increasingly demanding home owners, product overload, issues with product. All are combining to make work life pretty hard at the minute. Right now, I think if my old man decided that it was time to sell up and move on, I probably wouldn’t stop him.

But for me, how installers are feeling isn’t the biggest issue right now. It’s how fabricators are performing, and from my conversations with industry friends, the state of fabrication is not in a good place right now. Across the board. PVCu and aluminium appear to have their deep rooted problems. And I believe a lot of it is down to how the workforce is feeling.

I had a guy walk in off the street looking for a job the other week. He currently worked in fabrication at an aluminium company. He explained to me how much of the workforce was unhappy, that many wanted to leave, and that they were suffering from poor quality products at this moment in time. It was fairly obvious to me. An unhappy staff are a group of people not emotionally invested in their jobs and the company, and that results in poor products at the end of the line.

This for me is low morale in action. The tangible effects of poor products in people’s homes. I have always found that a happy workforce is one that produces quality window and door products on a regular basis, with little rejection rate. Installers can rely on that, knowing the products they’re going to be installing are on the money and home owners will pay up on time.

For me, despite business being strong, in itself I don’t think the industry is in that happier a place. Our industry is very different to how it was before the Great Recession. I believe that at all levels in the supply chain we should be hiring to relieve some of the stresses and pressure we all have. It has been tempting to squeeze as much as possible from the reduced numbers of people working in our companies. But I believe that we are at a breaking point. We need to all bring on more people to reduce the workload, reduce the pressure, reduce the stress, and I think we might start to see customer service levels and product quality rise.

What do you think? Does the industry morale seem low at the moment? Is day to day business harder to carry out in our industry now? All thoughts and feedback welcome via the comments section below.