Manufacturing HR Management and Industrial Relations Training Course

Course overview

Manufacturing HR teams operate where people, production schedules, safety obligations, labour cost, and employee relations meet. A grievance on a production line, repeated absenteeism on a shift, an inconsistent overtime decision, or a poorly handled disciplinary case can affect output, quality, morale, and legal exposure within days. This course equips HR and operational professionals to manage workforce issues in factories, plants, warehouses, and processing operations using practical industrial relations methods rather than generic office-based HR approaches.

Participants learn how to align manpower planning, shift patterns, attendance controls, performance management, disciplinary procedures, employee communication, and union engagement with manufacturing operating requirements. They practise investigating workplace complaints, preparing defensible case documentation, interpreting collective agreement provisions, handling grievances through staged resolution, and using workforce data to identify patterns in absence, turnover, overtime, and employee relations risk. The course also addresses the HR contribution to safety culture, contractor labour governance, restructuring, and change consultation.

Delivery combines instructor-led teaching with factory-based scenarios, document reviews, negotiation practice, and spreadsheet-led workforce analysis. Participants work through cases involving attendance abuse, line-supervisor conflict, misconduct investigations, union claims, and production-driven staffing changes. Each participant leaves with a Manufacturing HR and Industrial Relations Action Plan, including an attendance dashboard specification, grievance-handling workflow, investigation checklist, and priority actions for their own site or business unit.

The programme is suited to HR practitioners moving into manufacturing, plant-based HR teams seeking more consistent practices, and operations managers who need to manage people issues without creating avoidable industrial relations risk.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Build a manufacturing workforce plan using headcount, shift, skills-matrix, overtime, and absenteeism data
• Design an attendance and absence-control process with trigger points, return-to-work interviews, and escalation rules
• Conduct a structured workplace investigation using allegation logs, witness interviews, evidence records, and finding reports
• Apply progressive discipline principles to prepare consistent misconduct and performance case documentation
• Manage grievances through an issue-register, staged-resolution workflow, meeting records, and response timeframes
• Interpret collective agreement clauses to assess disputes involving pay, overtime, shifts, seniority, and work allocation
• Prepare a union or employee-representative consultation plan for operational change, restructuring, or workforce redeployment
• Create a site-level industrial relations risk dashboard using absence, turnover, overtime, grievance, and case-status metrics

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• HR Managers — who need to build consistent people-management and industrial relations controls across manufacturing sites
• HR Officers and HR Business Partners — who handle employee cases, attendance issues, and supervisor support in plant environments
• Industrial Relations Officers — who manage union engagement, collective agreement interpretation, and dispute resolution
• Plant Managers — who must protect production continuity while making fair and defensible workforce decisions
• Production and Shift Managers — who supervise attendance, discipline, overtime, performance, and employee concerns on the line
• Employee Relations Specialists — who need manufacturing-specific methods for investigations, grievances, and change consultation

Requirements and prerequisites

This is a foundation-to-intermediate course. Participants should understand basic HR terms such as recruitment, attendance, performance management, disciplinary action, and employee records, and should have some exposure to a workplace HR policy or line-management process. Familiarity with Microsoft Excel, including entering data and using simple filters, is helpful because workforce metrics are discussed in practical exercises. No prior union-negotiation experience, labour-law qualification, HR certification, payroll-system expertise, or manufacturing engineering knowledge is required. Complete beginners should expect to learn the core vocabulary and workflows before progressing to case analysis and industrial relations practice.

Training methodology

The course uses short instructor-led briefings followed by practical application to manufacturing scenarios. Participants analyse shift rosters, absence reports, collective agreement extracts, investigation evidence, and employee case files; then practise decisions in small groups. Role plays simulate a return-to-work meeting, disciplinary hearing, grievance meeting, and union consultation on a production change. Microsoft Excel is used to structure workforce and case data, while guided templates help participants convert learning into site-ready procedures. The final session is an application-planning workshop focused on a live workplace issue or realistic plant case.

Course outline

Day 1: Manufacturing HR operating context and workforce planning

• Manufacturing workforce models: permanent, temporary, contract, and agency labour
• Production demand, headcount, labour-hour, and skills-matrix planning
• Shift systems, fatigue considerations, and overtime governance
• HR implications of lean production, quality targets, and output pressure
• Core manufacturing workforce metrics and data definitions
• Employee lifecycle risks in plant and warehouse environments
• Roles of HR, line management, safety teams, payroll, and employee representatives

Workshop: Participants analyse a plant staffing dataset and produce a workforce-risk summary covering headcount gaps, overtime dependency, absence, and critical skills.

Day 2: Attendance, performance, and fair line management

• Attendance policy design for shift-based operations
• Absence trigger points and return-to-work interview methods
• Managing lateness, no-shows, and unauthorised absence
• Performance standards for production, quality, conduct, and safety
• Progressive discipline and consistency testing
• Supervisor coaching records and performance improvement plans
• Reasonable adjustment and medical-capability considerations

Workshop: Participants conduct a return-to-work and performance-review case workshop, producing an attendance action record and performance improvement plan.

Day 3: Investigations, discipline, and grievance handling

• Triage of misconduct, capability, grievance, and safety-related cases
• Investigation planning, allegation framing, and evidence preservation
• Witness interviewing techniques and contemporaneous note-taking
• Fact-finding reports, findings, and decision rationales
• Disciplinary hearing preparation and employee representation rights
• Grievance stages, response deadlines, and escalation controls
• Confidentiality, record retention, and case-file quality assurance

Workshop: Participants investigate a simulated line-floor misconduct complaint and prepare an investigation plan, witness-question set, findings report, and grievance response.

Day 4: Industrial relations and collective employee engagement

• Industrial relations climate assessment and early-warning indicators
• Union recognition, representative structures, and consultation channels
• Reading collective agreement clauses on pay, shifts, overtime, and seniority
• Interest-based bargaining and positional bargaining techniques
• Preparing for grievance meetings and joint consultative committees
• Managing disputes, work stoppage risk, and communication escalation
• Consultation requirements for restructuring, redeployment, and operational change

Workshop: Participants prepare and deliver a management-side consultation plan for a proposed shift-pattern change, including messages, data, concessions, and escalation options.

Day 5: HR governance, analytics, and site action planning

• Industrial relations risk registers and control ownership
• Attendance, turnover, overtime, grievance, and case-status dashboards
• Microsoft Excel methods for filtering, pivoting, and trend analysis
• Root-cause analysis for recurring people and production issues
• HR contribution to ISO 45001 worker participation and consultation
• Audit-ready HR records, policy controls, and management reporting
• Ninety-day manufacturing HR improvement planning

Workshop: Participants build a site-specific Manufacturing HR and Industrial Relations Action Plan with dashboard measures, control actions, owners, milestones, and review dates.

Tools & standards covered

Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, ISO 45001:2018, ILO Convention No. 98

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions