Attracting New Ideas and New Talent

This week's guest post is contributed by Mark Silverberg, president of Technoform North America.

Given the state of the U.S. economy and high rate of unemployment, I was shocked to learn that there are currently over 25,000 job openings in Cleveland, Ohio. How could this be? What are the effects of unfilled jobs on businesses and communities? What common lessons apply to the development of both sectors?

Last week I attended the kick-off summit of the Global Cleveland initiative. This project seeks to attract 100,000 newcomers to Cleveland by 2020 by making our city a place of opportunity for people of all ethnic and international backgrounds. Given the fact that the Cleveland metropolitan area has lost 50% of its residents in the past 10 years, it’s clear that the city needs a new population growth model.

A lack of qualified talent hinders businesses of all sizes in all industries throughout our nation. The economic impact of the unfilled jobs amounts to trillions of dollars of lost revenue.

It became clear to me during the Global Cleveland summit that many of the same tools can be used to attract, connect with, and retain new talent for both municipalities and businesses such as ours. Here are some key points:

• Creating welcoming communities is crucial to the success of your efforts. What would this look like in your company? For ideas you can ask your new team members to identify what worked to attract and retain them, and what’s missing? How culturally diverse are your welcoming efforts? Many plants I visit have majority Hispanic, Hmong, or Haitian workforces. We need to be aware that there are different levels on which prospective employees connect to a new employer or community, and that success is not an accident but a result of creative, sustained effort.
• Fostering strong networks within our companies can create a web of connections that bind people together. This can have tangible results in retaining employees and creating stable work teams.
• Leveraging relationships in ethnic and other affinity groups can be an effective way to attract and retain newcomers. Do you have workers from certain backgrounds that could help you reach out to their communities to help you attract new talent? Are all of your newcomers aware of the community programs that exist to can help them with integration challenges?
  

The colleges and universities in Cleveland, like many other cities, attract a diverse pool of domestic and international students. Targeted programs to give these students opportunities during their education have many benefits i.e. the students experience a North American work environment and our companies get fresh ideas and new cultural influence within our teams. Integration of these students into your workforce while they are in school often leads to a relationship that will endure after graduation. Our company consistently practices this principle by having interns work in our business, and moving them between countries whenever possible.

New ideas can come from interns and international students, and employees from different industries and backgrounds. At the Global Cleveland conference the HR Director of Forest City Management (FCM), a real estate developer with major holdings, cited the example of a college intern from Asia who completed a project on sustainable building as part of her college studies. She then led a project to evaluate implementation of sustainable building within FCM, and now heads this department at their company.

Strong, vital company cultures are more diverse than in years past. This diversity can strengthen team decision-making abilities and cohesiveness. In our company, openness to different cultures is a core tenet of our Vision, Principles and Philosophies. (Our tooling division in Germany is led by a woman from Afghanistan, one of our Bautec divisions in Germany is lead by an Italian woman, etc). Diversity is key to our long-term success.

Where is the job growth in the future? In Cleveland, it is in the education and medical sectors. The Cleveland Clinic, the largest employer in Ohio, is successfully employing many of these strategies, however the region must do its part to fuel the Clinic’s continued expansion. Our construction industry competes for highly skilled jobs with all industries, especially growth industries. Companies and communities alike wrestle with issues of how to aggressively increase economic vitality.

I believe companies and cities/regions that integrate creation of healthy, diverse cultures with economic vitality can create sustainable advantages in the long run. It’s people that make companies great, not bricks and mortar.

Interested in contributing a guest post? Email the editor at mheadley@glass.com, subject: USGNN Blog.

Roller Coaster Ride

Courtesy of Jim Dunstan, chair of Azon USA

It is hard to know where to begin. Without question, 2008 has been one wild roller coaster ride. Early last year, during an Azon management committee meeting, I raised words of caution for the months to come, in the face of the almost daily bad news from economists. I do not normally exhibit pessimism, but my last message in the Spring 2008 edition of the Azon newsletter I stated, “These present times seem to challenge America unlike those we have had to deal with in the past.” I marvel at the self-appointed financial pundits who take credit for predicting a worldwide economic depression like that of the 1930s.

Few readers of this newsletter share the privilege with me of knowing first-hand what it had been like during the Great Depression. I am a true and bona fide Depression-era witness. As a five-year-old Depression-baby, I recall the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During that time, soup kitchens and breadlines were everywhere, banks failed and the unemployment rate was at 25%.

Fast-forward 50 years to the 1980s when during the Carter presidency the rate of inflation rose to 13.5%. In December 1980 the prime rate of interest hit nearly 22% – the highest rate in U.S. history. Moreover, the jobless rate had reached double digits by 1982.

Another Fast-forward to 2008

Let us observe (on the roller coaster ride late in 2008) the current rate of inflation that is now declining due to falling oil prices, with reasonably low interest rates for those who can borrow and, at last report, non-farm unemployment is at 6.5%, but expected to rise.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has announced a change in the direction from the bailout of the U.S. financial system—the $700 billion, Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to a stimulus package to bolster the credit market. My sense is that The Fed is waiting for the other shoe to drop—huge defaults in credit card debt. Americans live in a non–cash economy. Anyone who doubts this need only to stand in line at the checkout counter to witness people swiping plastic cards for basic needs, the costs of which credit card companies take a percentage of. The credit card companies are very much in the grocery market business without owning a store.

The American auto business is on life support. My personal feeling, with all the proposed bailout money that is being talked about, The Big Three — Ford, General Motors and Chrysler—will go the way of big steel and will not survive. It is a sad assessment on my part, but an assessment long in coming—the American car companies have lost money for years. The jump in the cost of imported oil to over $145 a barrel rang the death knell for an industry that made its money off the gas-guzzling pick-up trucks and SUVs. The talk of propping up the car companies with bailouts from the Treasury has a lot of support from politicians beholding to labor unions. Money from the government to bailout The Big Three will not be enough to fix the systemic ills of overcapacity—too many assembly plants—products that don’t appeal to car buyers, and the really big one, legacy obligations pushed through years ago in collective bargaining contracts to a growing number of retirees. The costs of these obligations provide huge advantages to foreign car companies who also build autos in the United States. I do not speak to the merit of these issues, from my viewpoint “What is—is.”

Now that we are recovering from the election campaign fatigue, we can look for a turnaround in an economy that is bottoming out. Yesterday evening I filled up at the gas pump for $20 dollars less than just a few months ago. What has happened? Earlier in the year when the price of oil reached its apex, I raised some eyebrows when I predicted oil would be $80 a barrel by fall. However, oil is at $55 a barrel and still dropping. The hype is over. The speculators have walked away with the money, and the true basics come back into play: availability, the cost of production and supply and demand. Since the days of the oil embargo of the early 1970s, the voices for becoming energy independent have only been muted by the American’s love of cars. Every down turn in the global economy for over the past three decades has coincided with the price of oil—affecting everything we purchase.

Twisting and Turning for 2009

We will solve the energy problems; we will adjust our model for providing good paying jobs in a global economy that has shifted labor intensive manufacturing too regions with lower cost workers.

Azon surely is not untouched by the vagaries of an undulating economy. If anything, we enjoy the benefits for being in the right place with the right products.

Years ago my mentor, the late Sam Rich, founder and president of Acorn Building Components, the person most responsible for demonstrating the commercial success for the Azon technology, said to me, “We are not just building windows we are contributing to a basic human need—shelter.”

It is enduring business for us who labor at Azon. We are proud of the contribution we make in that very basic human need— providing comfort and energy savings in buildings.