BUILDING products manufacturer Emplas has achieved Investors In People status across the entire Emplas Group in the UK.
It means Emplas, whose headquarters are in Wellingborough, and its subsidiary companies Padiham Glass, Acorn Aluminium and T&K Home Improvements join only a handful of building products manufacturers and home improvement companies to hold the high-profile accreditation.
The award represents a significant achievement and recognition of the investment that Emplas is making in its teams but also in its infrastructure and service offer.
Group HR director Alison Markham said the successful assessment was all the more significant because it had been achieved right across the group on its very first attempt.
“As part of the assessment there are nine indicators and three themes or categories in each,” she added. “You only need to miss one of those 27 themes and you fail the assessment so the group approach increased the stakes significantly.
“There is nowhere to hide in a sense – everything and everyone is reviewed, from the directors to individual employees, and that highlights things that as an organisation you do really well and any development areas.”
Achieving IIP accreditation reflects the progress made and continued commitment to the company’s people strategy in the past three years, Ms Markham said. “We have grown significantly but still retain a very strong service-led culture.”
The work to achieve IIP accreditation started in June last year and was based on a confidential organisational-wide survey, leadership presentations, interviews with 50 employees chosen at random and documentary evidence from the central HR team against specific indicators. including:
- Leading and inspiring people;
- Living organisational values and behaviours;
- Empowering and involving people;
- Managing performance;
- Recognising and rewarding high performance;
- Structuring work and building capability;
- Delivering continuous improvement;
- Creating sustainable success.
In their report, issued in February, IIP assessors highlighted Emplas’ commitment to be an ‘employer of choice’ and the company’s consistent year-on-year growth. They also commended its lead in digital transformation, including EVA, the Emplas Virtual Assistant and customer portal. This recently saw it introduce real-time delivery tracking, two-hour delivery slots and 20-minute push notifications ahead of arrival.
The assessment also highlighted Emplas’ extensive accreditations, underlying organisational stability and commitment to invest and to continuous improvement, which it said contributed to a “collective optimism across the group for the company’s future and the commitment of its people to continued success”.
Emplas Group’s managing director Ryan Johnson said: “We want to be a leader not only in terms of the industries we work within directly but also to benchmark ourselves against the very best manufacturing businesses in the UK. We are making exceptional progress but we recognise that we have room for growth.
“IIP is a fantastic achievement but also supports us in identifying those areas to build on to drive cultural growth and ultimately a world-class level of manufacture and service to our customers.”