Hill says that the outlook for robotics suppliers is good as solutions for picking and packing gain momentum. But he was quick to point out that manpower remains an effective solution, particularly for retailers facing the e-commerce boom. He pointed to the 43% of respondents who plan to spend on labor and staffing in 2013, up from 40% in 2012 and 37% in 2011.

However, MHI’s Prest suggests that hiring practices have evolved in recent years. As companies expand their labor forces, they will tend to recruit and train with an eye toward long-term retention. No longer content to “throw bodies at the problem,” businesses will use employees to leverage investments in technology, maximizing the productivity of each. “It’s a different kind of hiring,” he says. “People are being more cautious about the types of employees they bring into their companies.”

As respondents work to grow their workforce and productivity, it is not surprising that safety tops the survey’s list of most important issues, placing above company growth, throughput, and last year’s top issue: cost containment. Moran suggests the reason productivity metrics have fallen in importance is due to the spending on technology in recent years, which has helped many companies to be more efficient and reduce cost.

“It’s one of the reasons we saw employment numbers hold steady while productivity increased,” says Moran. “People are employing every ounce of technology they can as warehousing becomes more and more sophisticated.”

But, there is perhaps a limit to how much productivity can increase while headcount stays the same. Hill suggests that, following the recession’s layoffs and large investments in technology, we might expect to see staffing levels and productivity return to synchronous growth.

This corresponds to the survey’s anticipated increase in the importance of training, which 57% of respondents said is very important today—but which 63% said would be more so in the next two years. As technology spreads to every facet of operations, says Moran, workers will need to become conversant in increasingly complex information systems.

Information technology and supply chain software
New entrants into the workforce will be surrounded by technology designed to make them more productive than ever. The change is already underway with lift trucks, where operators need both the mechanical skills to operate the machine and the abstract skills to interface with tablets and voice-based data systems.