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A.
The Company
Based in Scarborough, Ontario,
Innotech Precision Inc. has worked for more than twenty years on the design and
manufacture of custom injection moulds, primarily serving the automotive
industry niche. The company has also added a parts production facility to its
operations, and now serves a variety of other industries including the medical,
electronic and electrical industries.
Employment Profile
Innotech is a small company
with a total staff of 23 employees, including the addition of 6 new staff
members at the time its parts production facility was opened. Most of its
employees specially trained and are highly skilled. The bulk of the company’s
workforce is made up of certified mouldmakers, and the remainder includes
engineers (2), set-up specialists, machine operators, and office staff.
Innotech strongly supports the apprenticeship and co-op programs for youth
development.
Employee Turnover
The company reports that it has
experienced little to no turnover, with only one separation in 2003. However,
when asked how increased turnover might affect the company, Innotech
Precision is emphatic and to the point: they simply cannot afford to lose any of
their skilled employees who the company has invested heavily in training and
recruiting. The company relies heavily on skilled mould makers and tradespeople
whose qualifications are in very short supply in the Canadian labour market and
much sought after. The costs of replacing these workers — in terms of
recruitment and potentially lost productivity — would be significant.
B.
Employee Retention at Innotech Precision Inc.
“It would be nice to
have an HR department to work solely on such HR issues like this,” says a
representative of the company. But with only 23 employees, Innotech would have a
difficult time justifying the expenditures required to have an HR-exclusive
function within the company. Nor does it have an explicitly articulated policy
on retention. Nevertheless, the company is acutely aware that its workers have
skills in high demand, and is attentive to ways in which it can help to keep
those skills. The company’s approach to retention is simple and direct: “Our
efforts focus on working to ensure our staff are happy month after month, and
year after year.” This simple principle, according to the company, is
essential if the company wishes to survive and thrive.
Participation and Communications
The one area in which the
company feels it is contributing particularly well to employee retention is
communications. Again, while the company has little in the way of formal
management-employee communications vehicles — aside from a message board where
industry news and customer ratings are regularly posted — its small size enables
it to ensure that all workers have a chance to communicate their concerns
directly with management.
If the company has any
communications ‘policy’ as such, it is an open door policy. The company’s
management is conscious of the need to create and sustain an environment in
which all employees feel comfortable enough to approach the owners and other
executives about any concerns, interests or problems they may have. The open
door policy does more than simply help to create a culture of openness at
Innotech. It also provides the company’s management with a vital conduit for
feedback that helps it to address emerging problems before they become
unmanageable.
With respect to retention, the
company believes that in the absence of an environment that promotes open
communication — or worse, is openly hostile to communication — many employees
will simply choose to leave rather than risk confrontation. The company’s open
door policy helps to prevent such departures, and the company has noted that new
employees with previous experience in other manufacturing companies have been
genuinely surprised to see how easy it is to walk into Innotech’s executive
offices to address an issue of concern.
When asked what can be done by companies in the industry to
address high employee turnover rates, Innotech emphasizes first and foremost the
need for open communications within all areas and departments of the company,
especially between workers, their supervisors and management.
Orientation
Innotech follows ISO standards
to provide its new employees with the proper orientation during their first days
on the job. The company feels that its orientations provide an effective
understanding of the company’s business and how its different areas work, but
have also proven to be important in establishing a comfort level that allows new
hires to integrate better within the company.
Training and Development
For the most part, Innotech’s
workers are a blend of business professionals and tradespersons with many years’
experience in and outside the industry, and therefore do not require much
training; when necessary, their learning tends to be self-directed. But where a
training need is identified, the company pays for all the costs of training and
professional development, including off-site instruction. The company also sets
salary standards based upon employees for have successfully completed their
training in recognition of their skills attainment.
The company also practices
knowledge transfer on an informal basis by communicating the expectation that
people who receive training on the outside will come back and share that
knowledge within the firm. More formally, employees returning from external
courses are required to fill out a course evaluation and, depending on the
results, the company will ask the individual to provide a fuller account of the
training content, identify potential learning gaps, and then train other people
in the company who might benefit from the acquired knowledge.
In addition, the company tries
to hire one new apprentice each year, and every year sends at least two people
on Health and Safety and CPR Training (it has had no lost time accidents).
Wages, Benefits and Bonuses
The company benchmarks its
wages against industry surveys provided by such organizations as the Canadian
Plastics Industry Association (CPIA), and ensures that its compensation is
competitive with other companies in the market. In recognition of the high
precision work involved and the skills that it requires to do this sort of work,
Innotech sets its pay above the average benchmark. Regular benefits are provided
after 3 months’ service, and Innotech offers a company pension that matches
dollar for dollar after 2 years of service. The company also pays out bonuses
based on both the performance of individuals, and profitability of the company.
Performance Management
The company conducts employee
performance reviews on an annual basis which is a shared review, completed both
by their supervisor and input from the employee, but is also responsive to
employees’ requests to receive performance reviews at other times during the
year. In part because the company is small, a great deal of emphasis during
reviews is placed on how well employees communicate with people in different
areas of the company. The company is also attentive and responsive to the fact
that its performance reviews be perceived as fair and equitable.
Work-life Balance: flexible schedules
The company is cognizant of the
fact that people are often in search of a better balance between their personal
and professional lives. While it does not have formal practices to address
work-life balance issues, Innotech is attentive to workers’ needs in this area,
and responds to these issues on a case by case basis. One employee, for example,
is banking his overtime into vacation pay so that he is able to get additional
paid time to complement his paternity leave when his child is born.
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