People, Process & Culture: Summer Hours

Hello everyone. We're here on our Industry 4.0 Club Thursday LinkedIn Live on people, process, and culture. And we are here today talking a little bit about our summer hours and our plans for the fall schedule. And I'm joined here with Jason Bean, who is now our new lead on the Thursday rooms and LinkedIn Live for people process and culture. So thanks for joining me here, Jason, and welcome.

Yep, not a problem, Jan. So yeah, like Jan said, my name's Jason, and day job is IIoT Industry 4.0 market specialist for PNF. And when I'm not doing that, I'm socializing with the other guys in the Industry 4.0 community and trying to figure out ways we can help promote the education out there.

Yes, Jason's joined our club a couple of months ago, 3 months ago, I think, right, Jason?

I think it was about 3 or 4 months ago.

Yeah, 3 or 4 months ago. And Jason has always been in a couple of our LinkedIn Lives because we have, we have had the opportunity to have some of our members or founders meet up at various events that's been going on, especially like 2 or 3 weeks ago. We had a couple events going on like 2 weeks in a row, and Jason was at a couple of those. And so we already have had Jason on some of our LinkedIn Lives just to announce those events. But here today we're talking about our summer schedule. And although we're going to focus on Thursday, I just kind of quickly want to go through what our plans are for the Industry 4.0 Club. rooms here for the summer and going forward. So we had a little introduction on Tuesday, which was our Manufacturing Future room, and there we also talked about the summer schedule. And so the way we're going to be doing this in the summer here to make sure that both we have enough resources— we, we have people that are going on vacation and taking some time off as well— and we're sure that during the summer our Our listeners and viewers are going to have some time off, so we're going to have a little different schedule in the summer. And the way we're going to do that is on one week, like this week here, we'll have our Tuesday and our Thursday room being active. And then the following week, we'll have our Monday and our Wednesday rooms. And then the week after, we're going to go back to a Thursday and Tuesday and Thursday. So that's kind of how we're doing. So this week here, is our Tuesday and Thursday room week. And next week you'll have a room for Women in Manufacturing for Monday, and we'll have a fireside guest on Wednesday. And then we're going to go back to our summer schedule for Thursday and Tuesday the week after that. So that's kind of like how we're doing this. So again, you got Monday, Women in Manufacturing, and Wednesday the fireside chats on the same weeks. And then you have Tuesday Manufacturing Future and Thursday People, Process, and Culture on the same weeks. And so we're going to try to fill those schedules, and we probably also are going to do— not necessarily focusing on having like a whole hour, but maybe, you know, focus on having a a reasonable, uh, um, room or LinkedIn Live that everybody can attend to, or can attend and have the time to watch during the summer hours where we have a lot of other stuff to think about with our family and friends, etc. So that's kind of how we're going to be doing this, and we're looking forward to you guys joining us here. Um, and so, uh, when we're looking at the summer schedule, we're going to do 2 things. We're going to go through and find out some of the topics that we're going to be digging into in the summer, but also use this summer schedule to prepare for the fall schedule where we have some plans for how we're going to take the topics of this room in. And we are also looking for in the summer here, once you're hearing us every, every other week, if you have some ideas of topics, we want to solicit those ideas as well as if you are Based on the topics we're going to plan on for the fall schedule, if you have yourself maybe as a potential guest or know somebody that would be a good guest for those topics too, we're going to solicit that feedback as well. Jason, what are some of the thoughts you have for where you're going to take some of the topics for the Thursday Room?

For the fall, right now looking at planning 2 different series. The first series will focus on people with disabilities in manufacturing, and we're going to start by digging into autism and manufacturing.

Interesting topic.

Can people on the autism spectrum successfully succeed within the manufacturing environment? Is it a target segment that we can look at? recruiting from to fill some of those job needs out that are needed out there. So, you know, we're going to be looking for some guests to come on that are officially diagnosed with autism and get their personal viewpoints and feedback on how autism affects their ability to perform within the manufacturing environment, challenges they face, different issues that, you know, maybe they think need to be addressed that can make things better. So that way we can recruit more people from the autism community into manufacturing jobs. Then the next series that I'm looking at doing is Talking to recent grads, people that have graduated from colleges or university that have moved into manufacturing jobs. Talk to them about, you know, why they chose their education path they did. Was the education what they expected? How easy is it for them to find a job? And is the job what they expected, did the education properly prepare them. So, you know, if you know somebody who's a recent grad, let's say, uh, just out maybe a year, year and a half, that's in manufacturing that would like to come on and talk about their experiences, yeah, please reach out to Yan or myself and put us in contact with them. Or if you know somebody on the autism spectrum, or you yourself are on the spectrum and want to come on and address this issue, again, please do reach out because we'll be looking for developing, you know, a list of guests that we can bring on because we'd like to have this series extend over a few weeks so we can really dig into these topics and see how they can be used to improve the culture and processes at employers.

That's going to be some very interesting topics. We had a series last year with Purdue University, which was very interesting, and we did reach out through that both to the educators in Purdue University as well as some of their students. But we were looking more like a student side at the time, not necessarily after they graduated and then what did they feel, everything was appropriate or were they fully equipped with what they needed to be to succeed in their position? That's definitely one. And then on the disability side, especially autism, I think that's going to be a very, very interesting topic as well to dig a little bit into. And maybe there's also, I don't know, some organizations and others that we might want to integrate into that to see what are they doing to kind of maybe educate manufacturers about this space and what to do and how much work is done in that area as well. There's a lot of standards around disabilities, right? What you got to do for ramps and all that kind of stuff. But this is a different area that I don't think a lot of manufacturers are talking about, which you could— or employers are talking about.

Yeah. In my experience, The— those individuals on the autism spectrum, when it comes to employment, they're the forgotten group. We talk about every other disability out there. We talk about the accommodations that need to be done. But this is one where I really see that we don't talk enough about.

Mm-hmm.

And it's— and I think, you know, we need to— we need to not be afraid to tackle the topic. We need to talk about it.

No, that's good. I'm really looking forward to that. And as you mentioned, we would like for anybody that has some references to somebody that they know that could be interesting to talk to, both from the autism spectrum and also for new grads that's been in the workforce for a little bit, like, as you say, a year, year and a half, something like that. If you have— we're also thinking about how we can solicit that. So we have in our main page on LinkedIn, we have a link to our website. On our website, we can put some forms in where users or where where our members or followers can enter in both topic ideas as well as guest options there. So that's something we're going to work on. And I think also I'm going to be doing something on the Tuesday Room for like putting posts up around what are the panels that are— or some of the topics I'm going to talk about. And we can do that as well here, have some posts where hey, you know, in 4 weeks we're going to have this topic and solicit some both guest ideas and other topics as well. So that absolutely, that's what we're going to be doing. For the summer schedule, as I mentioned, we're going to be a little bit on the soft side, looking at maybe some of the existing topics that we already talked about, dig a little bit into those in some smaller chunks. And so I just want to quickly go through some of the topics we've had that could be interesting to, to kind of revive a little bit in the summer schedule. So, um, we had recently, we had a Day in the Life, which was a very interesting, uh, uh, a section where we went through 5 different, like 5 or 6 different people, I think, at different levels in manufacturing. What do they do? What was their background, etc.? So very interesting. Uh, we had, we had something on the circle— circular economy. We had net zero, carbon neutral, how does that affect Industry 4.0? We had interesting about the empowered workforce and high-performance teams. We have, of course, talked about DE&I in general in various different rooms. We talk about skills and skills gaps. And then, as I mentioned, we had a long series, very interesting series, where we had some Purdue University educators in that kind of talked a little bit about what they're doing, how they're, they're kind of influencing their area. This was in, in, in their state, of course, uh, and how that worked, how they kind of get their, their workers in. So the, the thought is here that we, we might just take some of those topics and dig a little bit into those, maybe in some shorter sections, um, to make sure that this is easily consumable during the summer. And so Jason and I will be working on setting up a schedule for the summer here with looking into these topics. And then every time during these meet— these rooms here, we'll definitely also solicit some input for the fall schedule, both new topics as well as guest opportunities as well. So that's kind of like what we're planning on doing here. You'll see the similar focus around the Monday Women in Manufacturing, whereas I think on a Wednesday we typically have— those will be a full hour of a specific guest, as we've had in the past. And again, also for both Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, of course, if you have ideas for topics or guests, please feel free to reach out to the leads of those rooms. Uh, or LinkedIn Lives, um, and suggest that. And we'll, as I mentioned, we're going to be working and hopefully very soon have a form or a couple forms in our website that you can also, uh, go in and, and fill in, and that will give us some feedback. So we're definitely interested in, as we've had over the year and a half we've been, uh, live here either on Clubhouse or LinkedIn Live, we've had a lot of different topics on the various areas like women, technology, uh, uh, and, and process, uh, uh, people, process, and culture. Um, and we've not exhausted all potential topics, but we're still gonna be interested in where, where we've been and where do you want us to go. So, uh, if you can give us some more topics that you think would be interesting to dig into, um, we are definitely open ears, uh, and we'll, we'll look at all all the feedback we get from you guys. So I think that is all we want to talk about today. Anything else you want to mention, Jason?

Well, that's it for today. Um, it's a nice sunny day out there. I want to head out for a walk at some point.

So absolutely, absolutely. No, it makes, makes sense. The same here. Um, I am also going to go out and, uh, enjoy the, the weather a little bit here as it's not too hot. It was— it's been hot for a couple days, but now it's, it's reasonable right now. So yep, but, uh, again, yeah, thanks everyone for joining us today. Uh, we're gonna be, uh, signing out here today on a little short introduction to our summer hours and looking forward to, uh, engaging with all of you, uh, during the summer and then go back into normal schedule in the fall where we're gonna Have a lot of great ideas for new topics and new guests in all our rooms during the week. So look forward to that and please join us. And don't forget to join next week, Monday and Wednesday, as we have some interesting topics already scheduled for Monday and an interesting guest for our Wednesday room with a fireside chat. So look out for that. And With that, we'll sign out. Thanks very much and, uh, have a great afternoon.

Thank you. Have a good afternoon, everyone.