An Exemplar Organisation …… ahead of its time? Andrew Beaston, Business Growth Consultant

Background The factory is closed now, although for 45 years the average tenure of the 250+ staff was 26 years and the average age was 53. The environment and the challenges:  Pay wasn’t particularly good  It was a heavily unionised environment  Need to increase productivity significantly – more with less  Redundancy costs were potentially high Massive required change - and it wasn’t going to be easy

The massive change The situation across the workforce:  Technical skills were not high  Most were temporary staff or fixed term contract staff  None were particularly skilled The big questions:  how to get the best out of the existing (older) staff.  how to adapt the work processes to the capability of the workforce;  how to make the job stimulating and motivate teams to adapt to change.

The approach The business adopted the best practice approach to engagement:  Continuous training  Identifying the benefits to the staff and the workplace  Stimulating the interests of the staff.  Objective to completely engage with the change programme not just go along with it! Productivity doubled, the business continued to grow. Then came the recession…….

In recession The business imperative:  improve costings and that demanded  business restructuring and changing work patterns They moved away from a unionised environment and began to operate as a small business

Attention to engagement never wavered The mantra  Communicate! Communicate! Communicate:  Openness and honesty Further business improvements were made Output doubled again - all in a period of two years.

The mindset All of this was achieved with the majority of people in their mid-life. They stayed with the business and even some of their children started to work in the factory. The management team’s continuing objectives  Make life as easy and enjoyable as possible for their people by adapting work processes where they could.

How did they do it?  A very clear vision  Communicated information to all staff and at the same time  Empathised with their people  Adopting the proven tactics of good change management strategy. They maximised the man/machine work combination to achieve maximum output from their older workers. The Philosophy: Continuing development. Machinery might not be Rolls Royce standard but….get the correct processes and engage committed people; you can achieve remarkable things!

Sadly … market forces won Redundancies – 60 factory workers  mostly older workers  within 3 months 95% of them had jobs.  Some just wanted to retire Redundancies – management team  many were older workers  all went on to get similar or better jobs. How?  Large scale pre closure activity to prepare their workers to find jobs and give them best chance of success in the job market 

The moral of the story RETAIN : a willing workforce of any age and they can do amazing things  All employees (older ones too) when understood and their needs accommodated will commit completely to doing their job well  changing the nature of a role to lessen its demands is just a matter of planning and allows people to succeed  when people feel good about their contribution they feel good about themselves - tremendous loyalty and commitment RETRAIN – constant training (with the right focus) increases productivity RECRUIT – the people who got the company’s staff and management team obtained a great asset from the beginning. WOULD YOU LIKE ONE OF THEM IN YOUR BUSINESS?