 Hello everyone, this is Jeff Mansfield and Jennifer Zieman with Proctor Worldwide. We are here today to talk about education and force development and some best practices. Jumping right into the study. We started this research in July and ran it through October of 2018 interviewing around 40 respondents on a variety of different topics pertaining to workforce development. We interviewed individuals such as CEOs, HR directors, vice presidents, and manufacturing supervisors with direct knowledge to share the topics at hand. The focus of the research included best practices, identifying potential solutions, some case studies, real world examples, and ultimately learning how markets outside of the packaging and processing equipment space are dealing with the same challenge. We've got a very well-rounded area of discussion pertaining to some ideas of how to solve some of these problems. For today's presentation, we're going to focus on two different areas. Hiring talent, you know, essentially where to source and how to help replace an aging workforce as they exit the businesses. And then, retainment. Essentially, strategies that organizations are using to help keep new talents that they hire and ideally help with the transition of retiring workforce leave in the organization. We wanted to start with a discussion on essentially where recruiting is happening first. And ultimately, we found through research that there are really four targeted demographics that organizations find that they're pooling most of their candidates from in the packaging and processing space. We've got high school and college educated, followed by retired workers, women, and transitioning military. The first demographic was of no surprise. There's a high-tardening area, very frankly, nearly every industry when it comes to new talents of colleges and high school graduates. We're going to talk a little bit about what resonates with the members of that demographic in the next few slides, but ultimately that's the first place that people are pulling from. The next category was a little bit surprising, that you also have organizations that, although they've got members of their business retiring, they're seeking out retired workers. This is not only their own staff, but also finding staff that recently left other organizations. Companies are finding that while people retire, there's still a large group that still want to be actively involved, it's just at a different level under different working conditions. Talk about that in a little bit as well about how to attract and retain some of those individuals. Respondents as well as our organization felt that there was a large opportunity in the last two demographics of recruiting former military and women into the workplace. Both look largely underrepresented. Women as a percentage of employees in the workspace, and particularly in manufacturing, and then there's a large supply of former military personnel. Ultimately, we found that there were very few differences between organizations when talking that these were the four primary pools that organizations pulled from. Let's start talking a little bit about pitching the youth, that first demographic that we talked about with high schoolers and high school graduates and college graduates. Obviously one of the best sources for future workers is recently graduating citizens. They can also be a very pervasive group to attract. One of the first realizations or findings that we uncovered in speaking with people was the fact that organizations have found that they're battling this perception that youth has on manufacturing. There are stereotypes that exist, frankly, heavily antiquated and largely untrue. That said, there's a good number of organizations that felt that when trying to attract high school graduates that they were fighting an image that had been building for years. Whether it's from parents or TV or just a lack of experience or knowledge. But ultimately, that image prevented potential talent from seeking manufacturing work as a potential career or job opportunity upon graduation. As a result, organizations that identified this as a challenge, and there were quite a few, found that the best strategy here was working with the community and education outlets to really engage them to break that stereotype. The focus here is not necessarily doing it in the senior year of high school, but actually starting programs in a far earlier basis. This would be hosting some type of career event, open houses was something that was mentioned quite frequently, engaging in educational programs or sponsoring events within schools, ideally aiming for as young as possible. So it wouldn't be uncommon to see programs in freshman year of high school or even junior high talking about the manufacturing workplace. And the purpose there is largely changing the image, making it not look dirty and hard backbreaking work. It has more to do with how technological it has become. The elements and opportunities in engineering and manufacturing technologies, the degree of robotics and automation, all of those things that really help change the image that manufacturing has in the eyes of youth. And obviously it's not every youth, but many. The case study we provide here on the screen is a great example of an organization that really took to heart seeking to break the image. And it's starting as young as possible and it's essentially painted a different career path. Again, it's the idea of changing the image of dusty and dirty. We pause and want to challenge throughout the presentation just some thoughts and questions to ask your own organization as you look at this topic. And the first one is a real early one, which is again, how early do you develop the manufacturing employee base in your organization? How do you track the next generation? Ultimately, if you wait to change the image until potential candidates are entering the workforce, you may find that you're too late. It's really all about trying to engage the potential workforce as early as possible through a variety of different creative programs. And you may find that there's some interesting opportunities that start to develop from it, no difference in planning to see. Moving into the next part of the age bracket of graduating talent. High school equipment was mentioned very frequently as a major focus for many of the companies interviewed. It's related to cost structure, the types of work. And frankly, the idea of building long term relationships with employees. Again, not necessarily a surprise there. Our focus really was understanding, well, how can organizations, what can they do in order to attract this talent, keep this talent? Or what has the most success? And we found that there were two predominant strategies that most of the respondents we spoke to spoke highly of. The first one was apprenticeships. And then the second was job fairs aimed at high school or early, early on in community college. The idea there is to educate potential employees about alternative viewpoints to a four year university program. Everyone we spoke to basically said that obviously going to college is fantastic but it doesn't mean that's the only route. And ultimately you can make a fantastic career taking on different types of trade skills within the manufacturing space. And that ultimately organizations were realizing that apprenticeships and job fair type programs were certainly apprenticeships were designed to help educate the workforce on the potential of manufacturing jobs before they make decisions into a four year university. And that gave them an interesting stream of talent to consider. So in the most effective programs we heard related to internships or apprenticeships included summer work programs, part time work. You've got opportunities where they're paid programs as well. Some of the respondents we spoke to highlighted the fact that paid apprenticeships or internships were valuable to the opportunity. One, it allows high schoolers to earn an income and start to understand the benefits of working in an organization like that. As well as frankly getting work done. It's not just an opportunity to educate, it's also an opportunity to execute responsibilities within the work stream and it ended up being effective. Many organizations talked about the ability to continue to recruit talent and interns or apprentices as they graduate. And at the very least have an open door communication for different options and availability as those students mature and have to make a decision to where to go. The idea behind all these programs is to continue to change the image, offer opportunity, offer a degree of direction. But frankly create really a common ground to attract young employees into the organization. The next demographic area is college. And when speaking with sources, again no surprise about the college element. Obviously as technology and requirements and manufacturing space, in particular for packaging machinery and processing, food processing. Colleges are an important potential stream for candidates. When speaking with respondents the best source of recruitment ended up being internships. Internships were viewed as ways to capture students as they're preparing to graduate and pulling them into the workforce relatively early. Before others can present them opportunities and frankly develop a degree of comfort with an organization. To make these effective the largest strategies that organizations really utilize are partnerships and relationships with colleges. So it's not just about offering an internship, it's about developing a relationship with the universities and campuses that are providing the talent pool. These programs from working with colleges and universities really helped organizations identify the top talent. But also promote the organization through a network with inside a university or campus, a community college that ultimately helps spread the word about the potential opportunities of working for the organization. It was mentioned a little less frequently but certainly of interest that was raised by a handful of respondents where some programs that they were executing that they identified as experimental education and what we mean by that are essentially programs that are designed to mix classroom education and knowledge development along with real world experience. So these were programs designed with the university that takes them through the textbook part of the job but then giving them a real world experience working within these facilities. The programs are extensive in terms of their length. A program is essentially done in two parts where the first quarter say or semester is spent with textbook and then the following semester or quarter is spent actually in a 12 week program within the facility itself. These programs were mentioned by the few sources that brought them up as highly successful but again that relationship with the university is critical to that as curriculum and programs are developed around it. But again what we found was that the people who mentioned these programs existed, they would produce pipeline employees every year of one to two but then the most important part of that was the zero percent turnover. So one of the challenges that respondents often talked about during this entire engagement was the fact that sometimes it's possible to find talent relatively quickly but the problem was the retainment of that talent that they'd lose a lot of the candidates that they brought in within the first year meaning that the problem of underemployment within the business or talent gaps never really was solved. If anything there was money lost in the development. So organizations are routinely looking at programs and not just develop talent or bring in talent but identify talent that ends up staying. When talking about what can you do to do that organizations that have these types of programs, these experimental, experiential learning education programs often referred back to that as providing again people who end up staying with these types of programs and then employing with the business end up staying for a longer period of time, a far longer period of time. In thinking about your recruiting strategy how do you engage your local colleges? What do these programs look like? Is there someone at your organization who's specifically tasked with finding talent and attracting talent within these types of partnerships? How ingrained are you with your local colleges and universities? Frankly it's how committed. These types of programs require leadership whether it's through HR or executive ownership. Again organizations who indicate that they've got strong relationships with colleges and universities indicate that they have fewer challenges when it comes to hiring and they get a better breed of candidate that has a higher likelihood of staying longer in the long run. When engaging respondents about other places that they source talent from they started to revert back to some of the more common elements that you would have heard frankly over the last 15, 20 years but some notable changes within those channels of recruitment. Most commonly in terms of recruitment a lot of the organizations we engage talked about the idea of finding local talent pools. But to do so with aggressive and almost constant focus. Organizations are continually always looking to recruit and they always keep the channels open when it comes to local talent. With an emphasis growing on digital technology and that's one of the big differences in recruitment that some organizations acknowledge to us they're being challenged with. They're struggling with the idea of converting to the digital platform that frankly many young Americans have today. There's a balance between national and local recruitment but ultimately whether you're taking a national local recruitment strategy one of the largest concerns that they have with bringing talent on is actually location and the commute. So one of the top reasons candidates were leaving organizations after they started had to do with the commute. Long commute, difficult commute and that ultimately organizations that took strategies to reduce the pain from those types of events found that they had a lower turnover but also had a better ability of attracting talent. So some strategies there included a variety of different things including changing operational hours all the way through some type of strategy that was offering some type of commuting service that allowed people to get to public transportation easier. Ultimately it was just how to make transportation to the organization easier. But then also on the recruiting of local national talent one of the other strategies that organizations between the talked about was just leveraging digital technology on a more frequent basis especially when attracting newer talent to the organization, younger talent. Leveraging digital interviews, submitting videos, having voice responses to questions, engaging them on a digital type of level before moving them into more official on-site interviews reviewed as highly effective strategies. The goals of these programs are really two-fold. One, younger talent millennials today are very familiar or more familiar with digital mediums and ultimately that serves to both present an attractive appearance as an organization but also helps candidates better communicate with the organization and vehicles that they're familiar with. So the second benefit and goal is that ultimately it allows for more effective recruitment with lower turnover. And the reason that is is because organizations can see more clearly how candidates interact, how they respond and ultimately their personality types. All those factors contribute to having a more successful candidate come into the organization and stay for a longer period of time versus the, we're bringing the candidate within the first 90 days to six months, it just doesn't feel like a good fit. Digital interviewing technologies, again having videos or voice responses to questions allows more of a personality to come out and frankly allows organizations more time to evaluate candidates. Organizations that stated that they use these types of programs found that attrition and termination dropped significantly. So a question that we start to ask is again, first how do you reduce commute time? Is there programs and strategies that you can enact that allows you to attract local and local talent to an organization by minimizing the inconvenience to potential workforce and candidates and frankly even employees? And then when thinking about different types of strategies to consider, are there times for at least white collar staff to work from home on certain days, changing hours of operation to allow for a more convenient commuting process? And then how are you also looking to leverage digital technology in the interviewing process? Keeping with the topic of digital, we also want to talk a little bit about the leveraging of social media in the recruitment process as well. This is another area that was interesting in talking with respondents. Clear awareness that there are many traditional channels to recruitment today, but when seeking out skilled talent that there are new places that have to be uncovered and leveraged, and one of the more frequently ones mentioned in terms of channels was social media and leveraging social media to help advertise the company, the brand and the overall need for talent. Increasingly organizations are leveraging social media to place ads and frankly just get direct access to talent pools. No difference in marketing. This is done through campaigns, creative ads and frankly routine engagement. Again, this is when thinking about how to attract talent certainly on the younger workforce as millennials start to become more developed in their skill sets. They've gone through their first job. They're looking for a longer career opportunity. That level of workforce is looking and understands how to communicate through social media and it's a way to reach them. We found that many respondents talked about the value of these types of campaigns and again on the slide here you can see how they're leveraging creative plays on elements that are present in media. The reference here is talking about Harry Potter as an example and how to create campaigns to excite potential workforce coming into the organization. Using social media provides a variety of different benefits one, it's relatively low cost. Two, it allows for simple communication and three, it can be done on a near consistent basis. It also changes the image about manufacturing or continues to challenge it. If we go back to the ideas that manufacturing can sometimes have an image of sort of stodgy and old, leveraging social media is a great way of changing or continuing to advance that image with younger talent. And again when we talk to younger talent we're moving into an era right now where again millennials are entering into a higher stage of their employment and career development. But these areas are not being left behind. The leveraging of social media, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, all of those are increasing and continuing to be used as mechanisms of communication. Organizations that don't leverage the use of part of their recruiting strategies may find that it's not as effective or the talent pool is different. There are still more traditional strategies that are being utilized and when talking about, talking to respondents about what else are organizations using to attract a talent. The one mentioned most frequently with the highest degree of at least success were open houses. It requires an investment. It requires planning but ultimately organizations have found that these produce a relatively good number of candidates in each one of the events. The goal there is obviously a rapid sharing of relationship or development frankly between a candidate and a potential employer. And what we found and speaking with organizations that speed is the key element to a successful open house campaign. During these events, they have their hiring managers or HR on site and ideally are quickly moving through initial stages of interviewing. The goal to move to a second and ideally final interview relatively quickly there and after. These events are essentially increasing the speed of recruiting. It's more cost effective than longer interviewing campaigns in some instances and ultimately, there's a better relationship developed with talent as they get to see the facility they're working in and ideally build bonds that are relatively early versus waiting for employment and so forth. Again, when speaking with respondents, there is a heavy emphasis on the idea of finding talent is one element but keeping them within that first 90 days to six months or the first year really is the imperative part. Once that takes place, they feel that they've got a pretty decent degree of predictability with where employees will go from there. So when summarizing some elements specific to hiring talent, again, one thing that became clear was that there's a change in what's driving success. Traditional or active engagement leveraging different media channels starting early and frankly just having a strategy around early employee or early workforce development were all keys to success. Traditional approaches of using recruiters and employment sites and resumes were actually mentioned quite frequently and it's not working anymore. This was a little bit of an interesting take but ultimately, while recruiters can certainly bring in candidates, they don't guarantee success and that many of the organizations we spoke to actually found that recruiters can bring candidates but you end up having to pay relatively large costs or large fees related to that that were again partially based on the salary of the employee brought in making it a very costly process. So that's great if you're fulfilling the need within the organization. It's not great if that candidate doesn't work in 90 days to six months or within the first year and many found that the lack of personal engagement sort of the disconnect between an organization and the candidate via a recruiter was potentially viewed as detrimental. The companies that claimed to have a highest degree of success found that they were not using recruiters at all. And then there was frustration over the traditional employment sites and resume sites about the potential quality of candidates that came in. Many of the organizations we spoke to certainly have relationships with those businesses but they found that the volume of resumes that came from those events or from those campaigns leveraging on-site or online resumes there was just too many. It provided a stack of resumes that required hours and hours and hours to go through to not have a degree of confidence that these were the right candidates and then subsequent hours and hours of interviews. Ironically, both of those types of recruiting strategies really indicate a level of hands-off. And if we were to structure any recommendation about recruiting talent that needs to somewhat change it has to do with the fact that the programs that have the most success are engaging and hands-on. As direct as possible with the organization seeking to recruit and the candidates that they're seeking to attract. Again, one of the other elements that was mentioned as well that was interesting was the screening of candidates and using assessments which is an interesting and frankly it's an old tool that's been around for a while that organizations talked highly about it the idea of using personality assessments you know, candidate assessments allowed for a more effective recruiting strategy you have a better idea of the type of talent you're hiring and most importantly you have the ability to compare and contrast between a pool of candidates. Assessments generally speaking from our experience are relatively low cost they can cost $100 per incident or less sometimes a little bit more but ultimately what they do is they help identify traits and characteristics that are not always visible in a handful of interviews. A lot of companies talked about or respondents rather talked about the success of recruiting and using pre-employment assessments really being critical to their hiring process and that they found that the quality of candidates they hired and the longevity of that candidate was better and longer when they knew more about the person they were hiring. This obviously isn't done with every candidate that comes in but those that are at least passing the first steps of the interview process. There's a small investment made that organizations that use these programs frankly do not complain about at all. So we do challenge we do challenge you to really look at how you're leveraging assessments and when speaking with respondents this is one of those elements that was mentioned it's just having the best bang for the buck. How are they used to think about talent and one of the most important things that you have to do when using assessments is to actually listen to what the outputs are. So there's a handful of respondents that talked about that as an organization we've used them before but we don't listen to what they say and ultimately as a result they find that they hire a bank candidate as a result. The test told them this is the type of person you're hiring and they're like don't I like him anyway are you going to give him a chance they find out that no it ends up being true. So if you do use assessments you really have to understand that the information that they're providing is valuable and you're buying them for a reason. Moving on to retaining talent and the second part of our discussion. Again this is an important part of talent management. One of the first observations that we found is that ultimately talent management was an important part of a company's culture and investment which doesn't sound like a terrible surprise but it's very often forgotten within businesses. It's moving on to capital investments and sales and marketing strategies and developing a new product but what we found was that 87% of organizations felt that talent management was a medium or high priority nearly 90% and that's an important figure to consider when evaluating your own programs. How much is talent management part of a core culture of an organization and talked about at the leadership levels. When thinking about how to oversee talent management by talent management that's a few different elements that's engaging talent it's helping develop talent it's listening to talent it's making sure that the employee base has a mechanism to interact with the organization and that there's shared and common beliefs between leadership and the employee base. When asking respondents well who manages this we found that most of the respondents we spoke to indicated that there was a dedicated human resource department or even a resource within that department that was focused on talent management and that's a key distinction and then there was a small level of organizations that leveraged someone within leadership to lead those types of engagements. The key here from the respondents that spoke about dedicated human resource department or dedicated resources towards talent management was the fact that it was something that had more focus. Respondents routinely talked about the idea that when you have someone that's focused on talent management as part of their responsibilities outside of leadership that it produced better results because leadership someone focused specifically on that area often can become distracted or it was something that was sometimes forgotten. So we do recommend at least based on the respondents responses that we received that having dedicated resource towards talent management was important or at the very least a function within the business and that organizations that leveraged a leadership member to drive that initiative even if it's a small one found that it was sometimes distracted from what was needed or required in talent management as a whole. Asking yourself, do you have dedicated talents? What do they do? How focused are they? That last statement we think is one of the most important. It's the focus on career and talent development that really matters the most versus an individual that has 15 other responsibilities within the organization. When engaging respondents on what organizations do on talent management and how do they help retain talent through different programs there's a mix of different responses. The first response mentioned most frequently to frankly no surprise to us was the discussion of safety. Again, it's a standard in manufacturing environments. It's the first place that organizations look to improve upon. It's some of the more frequent training that's executed within an organization. No surprise there. But when we really started to peel back parts of detail about what else are trained on or what other type of programs are executed one of the more higher mentioned topics on effective training and the attainment of employees was the use of on-the-job training and mentorship. This really had to do with employees of an organization that could be experienced still but employees new to the organization that really had to do with onboarding and longevity. How do we keep employees for a longer period of time? And again, the first year, the first 12 months but certainly 60 to 90 days to six months is really that that core period of time and leveraging some type of elements and mentorship really is allowing an organization to connect closely with the candidate for a set period of time. We heard programs lasted for mentorships six months sometimes longer to really help an employee learn a new role. Several companies mentioned this as really an effective model that reduced increased retention rates. It was hard to get sources to give it specific numbers but John has routinely brought up the idea that these types of programs really did make a difference in retainment. The mentorship is really the key part of that. It's not just that you do it but it's the fact that you do it with helping an individual fit with the culture of an organization and most importantly defining what good or great looks like. Another area that we found organizations were leveraging and this was on continuing to develop talent was leveraging some form of aptitude test. Sometimes those are executed at the point of hiring, sometimes they're executed later on in the employee's career but ultimately allows organizations to essentially project where talent is today and where they can best apply them in the future. Companies we talked to really talked about these programs is basically producing a faster development of an employee and improving retention as well. Again, it's an old technique within management of essentially putting people in the right seat based on what they like to do and obviously you hire talent for specific reasons, specific gaps within the business or needs but aptitude test will help you identify potential other areas that talent acquire or within the business as they develop can find that they produce other benefits to the business that produces a longer retainment. Aptitude tests were mentioned quite frequently as potential areas of opportunity once you have talents to find out where they can be placed and where they can best go. That brings us to one of the key challenges that many organizations are facing let alone many in the packaging machinery and food processing space. Obviously as the workforce moves into retirement it's creating a degree of challenge. There are several programs that respondents identified as having the most success about both keeping employees there as long as possible and also helping with transition. The first is to essentially enact and market internally programs that are designed for job flexibility once you got candidates or employees rather that are seeking to leave the organization or retire out. These programs are essentially designed to keep communication high but ultimately employees engaged but the flexibility is areas where you've got benefits such as lower work hours change and responsibilities and just overall easier schedules that allow employees seeking to retire more opportunity to get a little bit of what they want. Ultimately it addresses the desires of retiring staff but also helps keep up an income which is important. The most important part of this is creating and accepting culture. We found in speaking with respondents that sometimes organizations can have a culture that is sort of knee-jerk response to a retiring employee that's of important value to business and ultimately it's creating a culture that's not aggressive but ultimately supportive of those decisions being made. Having programs like job flexibility for individuals who have indicated that they're going to retire out of the business really helps lend to employees wanting to talk about that but then also engaging in those types of decisions that are supportive to the business. That leads to one of the second tactics that were raised and that's really prior notice campaigns. Companies have increasingly put this as part of their policy but most importantly it's part of their culture. Talking with employees about retirement and developing the plan well in advance of this taking place. A handful of the companies we spoke to or respondents rather indicated that they have programs that basically request or require 12 month notification in order to qualify to certain benefits or certain incentives that take place. A handful of respondents we spoke to actually indicated that they had two to three year notice programs. These were exceptions. There weren't many of the people we spoke to that had these types of programs but they also proved that they are possible. That ultimately you can find that candidates or employees rather will tell you that they're looking to retire well in advance. These programs are developed to essentially connect retiring staff to newer hires so when you have these notification programs the idea is a transition plan. And essentially we kind of talked about it internally within our business. It's the idea of almost mentorship at end of career. It allows a retiring employee to mentor their replacement. Transfer the knowledge. Transfer a degree of comfort with the role and do that with as much time as possible. Organizations were really happy when they were able to instill these types of programs within their business but again there has to be trust between the employee and the employer that there's a degree of respect given and open communication. So we talk about challenging you again do you have mentorship programs to connect retiring employees with new hires or replacements within the business? What do those programs look like? How are they executed? How well are they accepted? Are they trusted within the employee base? What can be done to create a better culture about accepting retiring staff and how do we embrace that group and help them transition on the organization effectively but also with enough lead time? When talking about retirement as a whole again in terms of not even just retirement but ultimately retainment respondents gave a variety of different programs that worked. One of the most commonly mentioned were some form of incentive program this is not about incentive necessarily for retainment although we did hear every so often about some type of bonus for time served with the company and stuff like that but had more to do with the fact that the talent these days in particular younger talent wants recognition this ultimately meant smaller or moderate sized incentives that were sort of executed on a quarterly basis you've got performance programs or performance incentives sometimes those recognition didn't involve some type of monetary incentive but merely recognition some type of award again the younger workforce these days has a tendency to resonate well with them and ultimately organizations that have some type of frequent recognition program found that retirement was an easier goal to hit again flexible work schedules again high touch communication was another area that was mentioned. The high touch communication was an interesting one and I think one that organizations struggle with but it's an important change to their business and frankly their culture. The communication is more about opening up a path that employees can engage leadership directly and just overall seeing leadership engage staff more directly again for a younger workforce for younger individuals this is important there's a belief that leadership having direct lines of communication with their employees or with them is an important bond that's developed and it's a feeling of openness that's created. This is not something that many organizations initially have as part of their culture it's not the way that many organizations and just leadership was designed. There's a lot of steps in between executive leadership and the entry level employee but the goal is that with some of these programs is to bridge those gaps and ultimately have leadership directly engage even the newest employees as early and as frequent as possible just showing a degree of personality and care and interest and that's one of the key benefits. There's also when talking with response about what doesn't work well points programs are mentioned merit programs are mentioned most frequently as being unused basically points programs are referred to crediting certain types of points for employees to get access to certain benefits or meet certain types of goals the point program was mentioned not having the type of pull that respondents thought worked well or they'd be unused points at the end which largely employees felt were ineffective two other areas that were mentioned which took us a little bit by surprise were this notion of company picnics and tuition reimbursement the last one being frankly the most surprising not too many respondents brought up company picnics but it was interesting to engage on it and ultimately a company picnic was raised by some respondents about retention the idea of creating this feeling of family and culture that ultimately when building a culture is important but the use of traditional picnics did not seem to really have an impact on retention at all in some instances with some respondents and these were relatively senior respondents they found that picnics ended up being in some cases a burden and ultimately it didn't engage employees again typically on their time off there was one instance that the respondents spoke about how they had a company picnic and no one showed up which is a real blow to the culture of a business but also indicative of the disconnect between leadership and what employees are looking for out of their organization again more frequent and higher it's really a replacement not even a replacement of picnics it's really the idea that more frequent events or higher frequency communication from leadership that engages staff is likely to have a higher impact on retention on the topic of tuition reimbursement it's not the fact that it doesn't have a value it's the fact that the companies that have these types of programs all they ended up doing is outlasting or lasting the employee requirements or the employment requirements that typically exist tuition programs typically require years of service and that moment that that contract came due and that the time was fulfilled candidates left or employees left so essentially the employees executed programs that retained an employee for another two years or three years for that contract to execute and then they were gone it didn't really help retention at all we think there's value to tuition programs but again there has to be some other mechanism that's designed to keep employees that the tuition reimbursement programs don't necessarily create a connection in their own right there has to be other engagement that happens in some of the other topics we talked about whether it's incentives or communication or again flexible schedule for some time for employees or positions that allow it and summarizing we wanted to give a summary here and sort of conclusion in terms of the top learnings first it starts with building awareness removing the stigma associated with manufacturing today changing the image making it look as high tech as it actually is and getting potential candidate streams to understand that as long as possible that migrates and changes to apprenticeships and working with education centers to essentially siphon off high talent and getting them engaged with the business as early as possible and frankly ideally earning money to the high school students and early college those types of programs can produce tremendous results once you have that type of recruiting talent then getting into a more educated space it moves to more formalized internships and recruitment programs that are designed to give both education and real world experience at the right time leveraging communication and developing incentive programs that reward strong performance and outcomes ultimately produce great results and longer attainment improving communication and engaging from leadership down to all levels of the organization are viewed as important changes in culture and behavior that ultimately feel employees more connected with the business and then ultimately creating a culture that embraces retirement and ultimately develops awareness of retirement well ahead of the retirement event provides strong success and then to help retain that talent the retiring talent again work for workplace accessibility with employees will help keep talent there longer and essentially adapting programs that help employees exit with grace and a longer period of time will produce a stronger degree of success that largely concludes what we wanted to cover with you today on the following slide here is just a brief summary of the demographics that we spoke to for this engagement here is that we essentially researched organizations that had 250 employees or less most of the organizations we spoke to were medium in size and then a handful were small and most of where we spent our time was on equipment manufacturers pharmaceutical companies food companies and material suppliers all really around packaging machinery and food processing and then a handful that were outside but still related in the manufacturing phase we thank you for your time