Our story goes way back to the very beginning of our journey, to the inception of an idea that we can be better at what we do, that there is more to learn and a better way of doing business. We take you back to 2008, when our old way of doing business came to a screeching halt and a pathway had to be built to a new way of life for our company.

There are so many parts of the Uptime Elements® that we unknowingly discussed and applied during those first few years, not really realizing that the Uptime Elements would provide us with a path to success. We had to “sell” the idea of reliability and make a business case for the development of such a program. We needed executive sponsorship, but even our execs didn’t have the level of reliability knowledge they do today. We needed predictive maintenance tools, better work scheduling and planning systems, and common terminology, plans and dialogue to help all our one hundred and fifty plus processing locations to get on the journey. (As of 2021, there are over two hundred and ten processing locations!)

While we unknowingly and unwittingly were building our path with many of the Uptime Elements topics, we want to really zero in on human capital management (Hcm) and reliability journey (Rj), because without an early on focus on human capital, we would have struggled even more greatly as we went on our reliability journey. Human capital provided the foundation for the rest of the journey we were about to embark on.

Our company is a company of very common processes, terminology, dialogue, and many systems. Each location management team maintains a lot of flexibility and autonomy for running the business. But when it comes to staff, training, development and job structure of the location’s maintenance teams, there was a major disconnect in the commonality of how we did things. Here’s how we addressed it.

• Clean up the job codes and job titles: We discovered that across our company, we had over fifty different job titles and codes for positions in our maintenance departments. Many of these, while they were the same job, were also missing appropriately documented job descriptions. Our engineering team was quite dumbfounded by this, as it was in such contrast to the way our company operated in so many other areas and departments.
  • ACTION: So, we had to clean this mess up! We developed a small team of our field engineers, added in a representative from HR, got a rep from legal to consult with us, and dove in to take a deep dive at what the job structure for our maintenance department needed to look like.
  • We reviewed in depth all documentation we could find in relation to these fifty job codes and titles.
  • Nearly a year later, we determined that forty-seven of those job codes could go away! We only really needed three positions in our plants, and while some of the forty-seven were the same and overlapping, we were able to cull the best of the job requirements from each and develop the three positions we currently use today: Maintenance Tech 1, Maintenance Tech 2 and Maintenance Supervisor.
  • We wrote all new comprehensive job descriptions, then worked diligently with HR and legal to best determine how to move almost seven hundred partners scattered across fifty job codes fairly and equitably into the three new positions.

• Clean up compensation plans: Through this process, we also found that compensation, from entry-level starting wage scales to long-tenured pay rates and across all levels of the skills spectrum, was a mess! Again, keep in mind that each location had a lot of autonomy at that time in how it managed job codes, as well as pay scales. And while each location still has autonomy today, we eventually were able to utilize the services of our very capable (and then fairly new) compensation department experts to develop standardized pay rates and compensation plans for improved equity among those doing the same jobs.
  • ACTION: New starting wages were developed, along with geographical zone codes for cost-of-living adjustments.
  • We worked again with HR and legal to determine how we could move on adjusting the pay rates of partners in those three new job codes fairly, legally and equitably.
  • While this process was largely driven by HR with the locations after we developed it, our engineering team was often consulted to properly determine application to the new job codes and roles.
  • Again, this took a while and was a process that was very carefully thought through, as any time you are dealing with someone’s paycheck, it can be a sensitive situation. In all cases, we were determined to be fair, equitable, and make sure we were doing right by each partner affected.

• Skills Assessment for Hiring: As we were developing the new job descriptions and roles, we were keenly aware of the fact that our hiring system needed to improve. We did not have a good method – really no method at all – to determine if a candidate had the level or combination of skills needed for them to be a contributing member of our team. Previous hiring decisions were made solely from the interview process and reference checks (references provided by the candidate!). We agreed we needed a much better way to determine job candidates’ actual level of skill and knowledge before we spend too much time in the interview process and then hire them into a job they can’t do.

• ACTION: After a search of options, we engaged an employee assessments and HR consulting company’s to help us with the development of validated hiring skills assessments, one for each of the three new job levels.
• We developed a team that met several times over the course of six months with the outside company representative. While the process is too lengthy to describe here, suffice it to say the development of the assessments is done in a way that is extremely organized, legally legitimate, and passes all requirements of the HR world.
• Once the assessments were ready, they were piloted by current partners in the roles at several locations for one additional step of validity and feedback.
• Once complete, the HR team modified our hiring process to include the skills assessment requirement early in the interview process.

In summary, the consolidation and updating of our job structure gave us consistency and control over job expectations. The standardization and validation of compensation across the new job codes gave us equity, fairness and the ability to recruit better at all our locations. And the use of a third-party’s skills assessment helped us to very quickly weed out those who could not help us on our journey, allowing us to focus on hiring those who had the skills we needed. Human capital management is indeed the foundation of the beginning of a wild and crazy reliability journey!