Provide Career Paths For Multiple Locations

With multiple locations, employees have an opportunity to venture into new areas of the company while advancing their skillsets.

By Jon Sillerud, Uponor North America

Companies with multiple manufacturing locations can be blessed with benefits or burdened with challenges. Multiple locations can offer greater opportunity for employee advancement, talent retention, and continuous improvement for future success.

Maximize strengths

With multiple locations, you can pull expertise from a larger pool of talent to gain greater advantages from manufacturing efficiencies to new ideas for continuous improvement. What works in one location can oftentimes work in another and vice versa.

For internal training, as an example, you can leverage a star employee in one or two locations as an internal trainer for all locations, instead of having one training person for each location. This offers your entire workforce an optimum training experience and helps with a tight skilled-labor market when finding the right employee can be a challenge.

Provide opportunities

A primary reason employees leave is low opportunity for advancement or a desire for change, such as greater schedule flexibility. With multiple locations, you have the potential to offer both and keep your skilled workers from walking out the door.

Offering positions at other locations provides employees with an opportunity to venture into exciting new areas of the company while advancing their skillsets to become even more valuable. This enhances employee retention and worker productivity, and ultimately provides cost savings for a business.

Gain consistency

The mantra of continuous improvement for a business revolves around consistent, proactive actions. By leveraging worker strengths and offering opportunity for lateral moves or advancements to various positions in other locations, you provide a consistent culture of positive progress.

A company is only as strong as its weakest link. By providing employees the empowerment and flexibility to try new ventures, you maximize the potential of undervalued employees to become stronger and better. EP

Jon Sillerud is Vice President, Operations, for Uponor North America, Apple Valley, MN (uponor.com). Reach him at jon.sillerud@uponor.com.

For more about workforce development strategies and techniques, watch our webinar presented by Jon Sillerud. You can view the presentation at efficientplantmag.com/2001uponor.