SUCCESS STORY

Beverage-Air is committed to promoting an environment conducive to continuous improvement and this applies to their employee development methodology as well. In the past, team members attended boilerplate-style supervisory training classes and executive leadership worked on changing habits and developing middle management on an ad-hoc basis. While improvements were made, they wanted to prioritize their focus on the Team Leaders in the Assembly Department who faced various challenges, including:

•  Assimilating new people onto their teams
•  Getting team members to engage and respond
•  Time management and holding employees accountable
•  Communication skills

The risks of not effectively addressing these challenges include a low retention rate of new employees and an overall lack of productivity due to poor communication skills and time management.

NWIRC’s Employee Development Specialist recommended an onsite 6-week Team Lead training program that focused on communication skills, high-level problem solving, taking ownership, time management and team building. Based on NWIRC’s experience with similar companies, spreading the program over smaller weekly sessions versus delivering the program in a few consecutive days allowed the Beverage-Air Team Leaders time to take the relevant classroom examples, exercises and activities into the real world between sessions with follow-up and lessons learned discussions occurring at the following session.