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

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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…….

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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!

9. 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 

10. 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?