Adaptability: The corporate buzzword that Canadian mining organizations should care about

Corporate loves a good buzzword. Bandwidth, Proactive, and Disrupt get thrown around so often that for some these words have lost all meaning, and for others, they’ve become downright nauseating.

Unfortunately for Mining leaders, now is the time to dust off their dictionaries and pull out a highlighter, because the age of Adaptability is upon us. And as much as the team at Calross Consulting despises corporate mumbo jumbo, this time were not being facetious.

As the talent crunch in the Canadian mining sector worsens (the industry expects 80,000 jobs to go unfilled in 2030), Mining leaders will need to prioritize adaptability in their workforce and their organizations to ensure they can hit production targets.

Why is adaptability important?

Much has been written about the virtues of being able to adapt to changing situations. The last few years of the Covid-19 pandemic taught us that organizations that were able to modify their processes tended to outperform their competitors that were unable or unwilling to adjust to what has now become the new normal. (Sorry. Another buzzword)

But for miners, the pandemic was likely just one of many outside forces that will require workforce adaptation.

With growing labour shortages, ensuring that workers can be cross-trained and up-skilled to work in different parts of a mining operation is becoming more and more critical.

To fill skills gaps, many miners are now looking outside of the industry for talent. Accommodating for a lack of mining experience requires both workers who are open to learning the ins and outs of a new industry, but also mining leaders who can tailor their management styles for workers with different skill sets.

Automation and digitization are also growing factors that are changing the way work is done. Mining technology is advancing, and ensuring that workers are not only willing, but capable, to adjust to these changes will be critical to take advantage of the benefits automation can provide, and to ensure that existing workers remain engaged when being trained on new technologies.

Adaptability is also critical for bridging the gap between different generations in today’s workforce. While older generations may have been comfortable in a stable position at the same employer for the entirety of their career. For Millennials and Gen-Z, lack of career development and lack of job flexibility are among the top reasons for leaving an employer. This means that mining leaders will not only need to alter how they manage a generation with different expectations of work, but must also be able to modify roles and career development plans to accommodate these expectations.

How to build adaptability?

While many workforce leaders agree that improving the capacity to adapt will be critical for the mining industry, exactly how to do this has left many mining executives scratching their heads.

One of the first things mining leaders can do to increase adaptability in their workforce is to reward it. While HR leaders often value adaptability on paper, in practice little is done to promote it. For some miners, rewarding adaptability could mean incentivizing cross-training and upskilling, to encourage workers to increase their skill set. Or simply celebrating new, better ways of doing things.

Some mining leaders believe that adaptability is an innate personality trait and have begun relying on psychometric testing to determine an individual’s capacity to adapt. These tools are now being used to justify hiring decisions. However, data suggest that an individual’s ability to adapt can be trained, like a muscle.

To encourage workers to build this capacity for adaptation, mining leaders should start with small changes. That may mean looking at micro-programs to upskill workers, as opposed to intensive training programs. Or looking at slowly introducing new or modified ways of doing things while avoiding major disruptions to daily work schedules.

Finally, while safety should never be compromised, developing a culture that is open to failure is critical to develop a workforce that is adaptable. Change is often synonymous with mistakes, and mining leaders looking to increase their workforce’s adaptability need to be comfortable with the growing pains associated with adaptation.

To develop such a culture, workers need to see buy in from management. Management can act as ambassadors to encourage adaptation and to develop a culture where change is encouraged, and mistakes are accepted.

For Canadian miners, dealing with technological advancement, changing demographics, and chronic skills shortages will unquestionably require improving workforce adaptability. There is simply no way around it. And as Heraclitus said, “the only constant in life is change.” (While we hate buzzwords, our feelings toward pre-Socratic philosophy remain ambivalent.) Happily, for Canadian mining organizations, the capacity to change and to adapt is something that can be developed.