Lauren International Inc. in New Philadelphia hired 100 new employees last year, bringing its total work force to 400. In the same period of time, only four people quit.
Behind that remarkable statistic is a simple principal. Founder and CEO Dale Lauren Foland believes that people are at the heart of his company, and he backs up that belief with a well-rounded set of HR practices that make Lauren International a regional beacon of stability, growth and profitability.
Lauren International is one of those companies most people have never heard of. Its products—a variety goods revolving around the theme of continuous rubber gaskets—are sold into a range of industries.
But a visit to its headquarters offers immediate evidence that this company is different from most. There are no reserved parking spaces. Office doors always seem to be open and lack the embossed name plates and other usual trappings of hierarchy.
The environment is open and everyone is on a first-name—or first-initial—basis. Like K.C. Jensen, vice president of advertising and marketing.
“A big part of his philosophy,” Jensen says of Foland, “is that if you’re going to ask somebody to spend 40 to 45 hours a week someplace, it should be pretty comfortable. He takes a little extra to put the wood in the offices … and have it open and make it very friendly and as stress-free as possible.”
Foland founded the company in 1965 and now has more than 30 years of evidence to support his belief that it’s good business to assume employees—even union workers—are your most valuable resource.
“I think they have a real good relationship. I know the local members have been very pleased with the company,” says Lee Hilson, staff representative for the United Steelworkers of America, which represents 173 union workers at Lauren International. “They usually settle their contracts early and without a lot of conflicts.” And union workers are eligible for most of the programs that follow.
“We have a corporate culture from our founder that … it’s less expensive to maintain and train existing employees than hire new employees and constantly train,” says James Hummel, vice president of human resources.”
Recruiting
Foland’s philosophy about people begins with recruiting: He would rather find the right person and teach the skills than simply buy skills without considering how the individual fits the company.
Either way, he’s got a challenge, because the biggest problem with being a large company in rural New Philadelphia isn’t finding good people, it’s finding any people. The closest city is Canton, 30 miles to the north on I-77.
“If I find a good person [locally], I usually hire them because they like it here,” Foland says. “To bring them in is difficult, but if you find them here, it pays to invest in them.
“I really don’t care if they know anything about [the business],” he continues. “Out of the company of 400, I don’t think there’s half a dozen that have previous experience. In fact, sometimes I think it’s a handicap. I want them thinking about the future and not the past. Sometimes the past is very outdated.”
To bring people from outside of New Philadelphia means making the company more alluring than most; he knew all along that he would have to provide a comfortable environment and opportunities for growth.
But if those characteristics bring people into the company, the first chore was bringing them to the front door—not only for salaried positions but to fill the up-and-down needs of the production side.
To that end, in 1995, Lauren International struck up a partnership with Interim Personnel. The company provides free office space to Interim, which in turn makes sure that Lauren International always has enough people on hand.
“We’ve always had a temporary work force,” says Hummel. “Being an automotive company, we need a work force that’s very flexible and can cut our overhead down.”
Interim serves other area companies from the office, but at any time it will have 60 to 80 people working within Lauren International.
In addition, Interim placed about 80 of the new hires that Lauren made last year—mostly through an informal temp-to-perm arrangement.
“They are already oriented to our company when we do hire them full time,” Hummel says. “They know what they’re doing, they’re familiar with us and they produce at a higher level than hiring someone off the street.”
Hummel says the close relationship with the “in-house” temp agency is one of the reasons Lauren International has been able to keep turnover to just 1 percent.
“You hire people who have never been in a factory before and never been in this environment before, but they want a job,” Hummel says. “Then they get in and say, ‘This is not what I want.’ But these [Interim] folks have been here for a period of time and they know exactly what company they are working for.”
Hiring for the more technical jobs—such as research and development—requires a different approach: a share of success.
“I pretty much pay them what they want and I offer them a bonus based on patents,” Foland says. As a general rule, after expenses, the inventor receives 2 percent of whatever sales the patent generates.
“The whole idea is to get them to think, because so much in the past, you hire somebody who makes a good profit for you and the president of the company walks away with a whole big chunk of dough and that man gets a watch,” Foland says. “I never considered that fair. I’ve got a notion, in time, that a couple of the guys will be making a lot more money than I am, but I don’t care, because it’s just going to grow the business.”
Training and orientation
Once an employee is in the door, that person’s first job is to learn about the company.
Along with an employee handbook and tax forms, each new hire gets a binder, which details the company by departments. It’s up to the employee to set up training sessions with each department for a one-on-one orientation.
That program is an outgrowth of an effort begun three years ago to help everybody understand where he or she fits into the big picture.
“We thought, ‘OK, what we really need to do because we’re growing so rapidly is we really need to make sure with all of these new people here, they come up to speed as quickly as possible.’ So the right hand knows what the left hand is doing, basically,” says Jensen. “Being QS-9000 certified means that you have to have your employees with a pretty good sense of how the whole system works, not just their job. They don’t have to be able to do somebody else’s job, but it certainly helps that they understand what that is.”
Each department and division assembled a program detailing what it does and what’s new. Everybody in the company was put through a rotation, with the programs held over coffee and donuts.
“Then it just made sense to us to periodically repeat the topics” once a year, Jensen says.
Fred Rainsberg is a 42-year-old union production worker who joined Lauren full-time last June after working two years on a part-time basis.
“One thing I can say about the training program is that I saw the benefit of it,” Rainsberg says. “There’s a lot of other people that are here just to work their job and they’re not so much interested in how everybody else fits into the whole process. A lot of people have a narrow focus. While they could get the benefit out of it, they just see it as a waste of time. That’s not the company’s fault, that’s lack of vision on their part.”
Education
Getting employees is one thing; keeping them is another. One of the strongest programs Laur
en offers to that end is its encouragement of continuing education.
Last year, in conjunction with Ashland University, Lauren formed L.E.A.P.—Lauren Educational Assistance Program. The program offers free college classes in the company’s training room to all full-time employees. The classes are also open to the public and to family members at a discount, which helps the company recover the fee it pays to Ashland.
Hummel says the program was based on two factors: the need to attract employees and the need to help them keep up with technology. Lauren has helped customize some of the courses to maximize the benefit to operations.
L.E.A.P. was designed to augment the long-standing tuition reimbursement program for older employees who felt awkward going back to school.
“Even if they’re taking a class here or there and are not going for a degree, getting our employees to continue learning and using their ability to learn is going to hopefully have a positive effect on the floor,” Hummel says.
The company backs that up with money. If an employee’s class conflicts with a chance to earn overtime, he or she can attend the class and, under company policy, still get paid for the overtime.
“We don’t have any stipulations on their degrees or paying us back or working,” Hummel says. “The only stipulation is that if they would leave during mid-semester, that money has to be repaid.”
What about the notion of educating employees right out the door and into jobs with other companies? It happens occasionally, Foland concedes, but not often enough to create any worries. Last year, 10 out of 85 salaried employees received degrees.
“I was amazed how many have gone through this educational system that started here and are still working here,” Foland says.
Kevin Gray, president of the Edgetech unit, is a case in point. He came to work at Lauren with an associate’s degree and earned his engineering degree while on the full-time payroll. He then went on to get his MBA and is now working on a doctorate.
“We are always trying to improve our employees’ skills,” Hummel says. “During the summer, we hire a computer teacher and we hire a math teacher. They’re on call during the summer months and employees can use them one on one for tutoring. Whatever help they need, whatever level they need. As much as they want or as little as they want.”
Benefits
Some companies offer benefits because it’s the law. Others offer benefits just good enough to match the competition. Not surprisingly, Foland’s company offers benefits to attract employees.
“With the unemployment rate and the job market the way it is, it’s hard to attract employees,” Hummel says. “We wanted to be the benchmark for other companies.”
Employees can choose a point-of-service or a preferred provider health care plan. They can opt into dental and vision plans and a pharmacy card. Annual physicals and teeth cleanings are fully reimbursed for all employees.
Lauren also buys life insurance, as well as short-term disability, for hourly employees, and long-term disability for salaried employees.
There are other niceties, too, that cost the company little or nothing: a pharmacy that delivers to the plant and a dry cleaner that picks up and delivers at a 20 percent discount.
“Our benefits are outstanding. You talk around town and talk to different people and they can’t even compare to our benefits,” says Rick Brown, a 40-year-old union production worker from South Carolina who relocated and joined the company three years ago. “That means a lot to me with three kids.”
Next on the company’s wish list: a transportation service that would bring workers to and from home for a nominal fee and on-site day care.
“The strategy is to offer as many things to the employee to make their everyday lives less stressful. The less stress there is for an employee to worry about, the more time they have to put their attention on their work,” Hummel says.
Foland tells a story: “We were trying to develop a new sheet line and we couldn’t get it to work.” A janitor who had joined the company as a part-time worker was watching the whole thing from afar. He made some observations and suggested a mechanical change. “Since everything else had failed, we tried it,” Foland says, “and it worked.
“The biggest thing I’d hate to lose is the attitude of people who can maintain enthusiasm to keep looking around them,” Foland says. “In other words, to keep looking without fear of losing their jobs. … If they make mistakes, we learn from them. There’s too many good ideas that have come from different people throughout the factory.”
Rick Brown, the transplant from South Carolina, has seen it happen, and he knows why: “I really believe deep down that they really do care about us,” he says. “They’re not like, ‘Well, they’re just a bunch of workers, lets not worry about them.’
“You talk to these people that have been here for years and it amazes me that they do the same thing every day but they have no desire to leave. There’s a lot of them out there who’ve been here 20 years plus. They must like it.”
Dale Foland was a 1998 Entrepreneur Of The Year in the technology category. He also won the Governor’s Work force Excellence Award for companies with outstanding training programs.
SBN is a proud sponsor of Ernst & Young LLP’s Entrepreneur Of The Year program. This story was independently reported by the SBN staff and was not subject to prior review or approval by Ernst & Young or any other Entrepreneur Of The Year partner.