A Productive Work Force

Skilled. Flexible. Highly productive. Those are the qualities that site-selection professionals look for when assessing the labor pool available for a prospective relocation.

They’re alsothe words that many of those same professionals use to describe the work force in the Kansas City region. Spanning a 22-county region—13 in Missouri and nine in Kansas—the Greater Kansas City areanow boasts a population of 2.2 million. That ensures employers in the region of a relatively large work force. But more than that, one that is defined by its productivity.

Much of that is grounded in reliability: People in this region who have jobs, by and large, show up for work—and when they get there, they perform at higher levels than their counterparts in much of the country. Figures from the Census bureau and U.S. Department of Labor consistently show the region outperforming the nation as a whole in terms of missed work time and worker’s compensation claims, but also in per-worker productivity.

Area business owners and managers consistently recognize the high quality of the region’s work force; they consistently stress the value of the “Midwestern work ethic” and that same productivity when asked about the keys to success within their own organizations..

The real measure of this region’s work-force attributes, though, comes from some of the biggest names in American business.

Ford Motor Co., which operates the Claycomo assembly plant on the Missouri side of the region, has frequently undertaken multi-million-dollar investments in that facility. And in 2010, it reaffirmed its commitment to keeping that plant going after the state committed to a $100 million tax-incentive program to help safeguard the 3,600 jobs there.

CEO Alan Mulally has frequently cited the productivity of those workers as a fundamental reason why the company has maintained production facilities here for the better part of a century. And his largest American competitor, General Motors, has seen the same thing, pouring tens of millions in to upgrades at its Fairfax assembly plant on the Kansas side of the region, where more than 2,700 are employed. Most recently, that has meant an additional $136 million investment backing up the company’s strategic decision to produce the next generation of one of its top sellers, the Chevrolet Malibu.

These observations are validated by other sources; the Census Bureau, in fact, has reported that workers in greater Kansas City contribute 50 percent more value per hour than their counterparts in many other cities. And the National Center for Health Statistics has reported that, among the largest 33 metropolitan areas in America, Kansas City workers ranked No. 1 in terms of fewest sick days taken.

Fortune magazine, as well, has ranked Kansas City’s work force best in the nation.

Rural Roots

One likely reason for the superior quality of this region’s work force is that a significant percentage of residents here can trace their roots directly to farms and farm communities, places where hard work is a deeply held and widely shared value. In many cases, those workers are just one generation removed from the land.

This tradition continues today because many workers—including a number of those at the large plants cited above—commute from suburban and exurban communities that still hold dear the value of hard work and personal responsibility. Because of the area’s excellent highway system and relatively mild winters, workers who live in the rural areas 50 or 60 miles away from the city can be at the job site in a predictable 50 or 60 minutes.

In recent years, state governments in Kansas and Missouri have aggressively promoted work-force training with incentives and other programs to make quality workers available and affordable.

In greater Kansas City, these state efforts are augmented by vocational schools and, of special note, the area’s excellent network of community colleges. In recent years, these schools have embraced a mission of work-force training to augment their roles as first post-graduate educators for many of the region’s high school graduates.

Several programs are in effect custom-made for specific industries. When Harley Davidson decided to place an assembly plant in Platte County, it teamed up with the area’s Metropolitan Community College to create an in-house training program. Harley was so pleased with the effort that it now offers tours to visiting owners and managers who want to see how effective locally-based training programs can be.

On the Kansas side, Kansas City Kansas Community College and Johnson County Community College operate similar programs widely known for targeted and innovative work-force training. Other Kansas City area institutions of higher learning also focus on work-related programs, including respected schools such as DeVry and the Colorado Technical Institute.

Other programs are available at the area’s many colleges and universities, which have also undergone significant programming changes, especially within their graduate programs, to foster collaboration between departments that have long worked in “silos.” The result? Courses that are tailored more toward meeting new and emerging needs of employers in the region.

State Support

Missouri, like Kansas, works hard to create a positive economic environment. In recent years, those efforts have included an aggressive statewide plan to support worker training with the Missouri Quality Jobs Act. The program established a withholding-tax incentive arrangement for state and local economic development officials to use to attract and create new jobs.

In order to qualify for these programs, employers must offer basic health insurance for new employees in new jobs and pay at least 50 percent of health-insurance premiums for all parts of the program.

The new jobs that are created must be at or above the county average wage. Employers would retain a portion of withholding taxes paid to employees in newly created jobs. In addition, an employee would continue to receive full credit for all taxes withheld from their paychecks.