BOSCH NORTH AMERICA: Before the pandemic, Bosch North America Senior Vice President of Human Resources Charlie Ackerman's team was busy building a ground-up apprenticeship program to grow talent within the industrial automation and automotive mobility tech supplier's ranks. For the past year, Ackerman's work has shifted toward a new reality: the majority of the company's 3,000 employees in Farmington Hills and Plymouth don't want to come back to the office five days a week after a year of working remotely during the coronavirus pandemic. That's caused Ackerman to devote his attention to a culture shift within Bosch where employee supervision is less about physically seeing them working and more about seeing results.
The last time we talked, you were starting to develop an apprenticeship to deal with your talent shortfalls, particularly in the information technology space. How is that going? How has it progressed during the pandemic?
We're excited to have the first cohort developed and running at this point in time. Like most things that occured last year in 2020 when COVID hit, we had to scale that down from having 16 apprentices, we scaled that down to five. We have those (apprentices) on board right now. They're doing extremely well. ... We've been able to overcome a lot of the challenges of onboarding them. Going through interview processes. But we managed those. They're on board since the fall of 2020 and they're halfway through and we're looking to graduate them in the third quarter of this year.
How has onboarding new employees gone over the last 12 months? Have you had some fails along the way? How have you managed that?
I don't think we've had any fails. That's the good sign. But I will tell you, there are a lot of details that have to be managed, first in the interviewing process. ... A big hurdle is once we begin to hire a candidate, one particular piece of responsibility that we have is doing an I-9 assessment (to verify their identity) when a person gets onboarded. You literally, by law, have to visually see this person, and it is not allowed to be able to see them over video — they have to come in. That was a bit of a wrinkle that we had to manage. ... But we did it, we overcame it and we've got good practices now.
How many of Bosch's 3,000 employees at the Farmington Hills and Plymouth campus have remained on the worksite during the pandemic?
That's pretty limited to our labs and associated engineers around those labs that's really required. Roughly 500 employees have the need to actually go in. But other than that, the remaining associates find themselves working virtually.
And how has that gone?
Actually, better than expected. Last year, we found very early on that we saw that we were not going to be coming back. We didn't know how long. And this is the elusive question that keeps coming up: When are we going to be coming back? About the third quarter of last year, we did a survey of the Farmington Hills-Plymouth associates, leadership. ... Even at that point early on, we were beginning to learn how much associates appreciated working in a virtual situation. Seventy-five percent of our associates believe that working from virtually that the type of working relationship we need to have going forward. We may moderate that a little bit more, a little bit less, giving more of a hybrid approach. But that's still yet to be determined. But we're finding the situation has been very, very good for us. Not our associates, but our leaders, have a tendency to believe that our productivity went up. ... The biggest takeaway for us right now, knowing directionally going forward, we're trying to reinforce this new culture ... of moving from a culture of presence to a culture of performance. Because in the past, people would say, 'Well, if I don't see them, maybe they're not working.' Well, that's not true. As a matter of fact, we know through example after example that we are actually working at becoming more productive.
Do you team leaders find that there's still innovation going on, that people don't necessarily be in the same room to think up the new great idea?
That's one thing we know we need to preserve — this internal collaboration. But I would also say we've been fortunate years ago when we started looking at advancing a lot of our technology platforms, those platforms are already there. If we happen to be in Microsoft Teams, there's a whiteboard system that's out there. Either through whiteboard or Mural or other applications, the associates may not have seen the use for it before, but they see the need to use it now. ... The infrastructure was already in place — we're just utilizing it more.
It sounds like you're moving to some kind of hybrid working environment, but there could be some flexibility if you have an employee who wanted to be remote. What's the distance anymore with working in Farmington Hills? Do you have to still live in metro Detroit? Or can you live in Denver? Or Chicago?
We're going through those discussions right now, and it's still yet to be determined. But it's on our radar screen. We know very clearly that there's a certain dynamic in any business — it's not just Bosch — that requires a certain level of watercooler talk and collaboration. 'Hey, I've got this idea. Have you thought about this?' It happens in the caefeteria. It happens in the hallways. It happens in very informal times. One thing we have to do is make sure as leaders in the organization that we're acknowledging that, that we're aware of it and continuing to create this kind of environment, even in a virtual way.
Do you think as you're embracing remote work that the market for labor is changing and you're going to just have to embrace it because talent will come along and you'll want to get them to come work for Bosch and they'll say, "Well, look, I can work from home working for your competitor."
I would say it like this: We're going to have to understand the delta between what we would call commutable distance to the office versus literally just working from anywhere. And I would say right now in a very conservative way, we're really trying to make sure that people feel into more of the physical site and making sure that people on an exceptional basis, they may have individual personal needs — real needs — that pull them away. But we hope that they're going to stay with us in our local physical facilities.
Any plans to downsize any of those facilities at this point?
Nothing at this point. We know that our footprint is our footprint. But it gives us an advantage that if we want to continue to grow we may not necessarily need as much of that footprint.
"work" - Google News
March 28, 2021 at 11:05AM
https://ift.tt/2Py5Wnw
Charlie Ackerman on Bosch a year into work-from-home: Shifting from 'culture of presence' to 'culture of performance' - Crain's Detroit Business
"work" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3bUEaYA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Charlie Ackerman on Bosch a year into work-from-home: Shifting from 'culture of presence' to 'culture of performance' - Crain's Detroit Business"
Post a Comment