The company
Reflex Labels was established 10 years ago at a plant between York and Leeds. The business started life supplying promotional and pressure sensitive labels, predominantly to the food sector, but now caters for a range of sectors including homecare, personal care, pharmaceuticals and the automotive industries.     
Through a steady series of mergers and acquisitions, the firm has grown into a £65m-turnover company with 320 employees and six manufacturing sites across the UK. Currently, Reflex prints its self-adhesive labels and flexible packaging work predominantly on flexo presses. But the company has signed up for one of the first Landa presses, due to be delivered early next year.

Reflex’s USP
Reflex puts its success in growing into such a big player in the UK label market squarely down to its people. It might be expected, then, that staff are incentivised here by rigorously structured promotion schemes. But this in fact couldn’t be further from the truth. While you might assume a tantalising new, more senior, job description might best motivate an employee, Reflex actually doesn’t believe in official job titles at all.

"People are separated into teams and are aware of their general job description," says Will Parker, who might most accurately be described as operations manager, but whose responsibilities on any given day could range from "operating in a multinational account manager’s role, to operating in a site manager’s role, to washing and vacuuming a car".

"But we don’t pigeonhole salespeople in sales, operations people in operations... the lines are much more blurred than that."

The aim, Parker explains, is to foster free thinking and creativity, with staff motivated to get involved with a task even if it is not strictly within their official remit.

"We like people to take ownership, no matter what they’re dealing with," he says. "It’s never a case of this is your territory, this is my territory. It’s about taking the barriers away and making things more collaborative."

The method
As deliberate as such an unusual practice as dispensing with job titles may sound, this ethos has in fact been established organically as the company has grown, reports Parker.

"To say it’s been implemented would be wrong," he says. He reports that the company certainly doesn’t hold workshops or meetings about instilling a culture of cross-boundary co-operation.

"I think everyone just kind of gets it," says Parker. "We don’t have a huge HR department managing people and sitting them down and doing assessments. We’ve never moved someone into an area they’re not happy to be in, they move themselves. It’s a bit like water bubbles. They just move where they want to move naturally."

This laissez-faire approach to managing people’s job descriptions very much reflects the business’s overall ethos, says Parker.

"The whole business is organic," he says. "We have a lot of biomimicry. The design departments are called the greenhouse, because that’s where the seeds for ideas are sown. Our website doesn’t look that way [with a design featuring blue skies, clouds, wind turbines and trees], because we’re all on drugs and thinking we’re in a George Harrison album. The biomimicry is there for a good reason."

"Of course there have to be some rules, we’re not some sort of hippy commune. There’s a degree of implied structure," qualifies Parker.

He adds that, though typically the firm likes people to gravitate naturally towards areas they’re interested in and have discovered a particular, perhaps unexpected, aptitude for, he and other senior members of the Reflex team will also on occasion gently nudge employees into new areas.

This approach is successful and never risks pushing someone in a direction they don’t want to go in, because those in management positions – thanks to also getting involved in a hands-on way with lots of different areas of the business – know their staff well, says Parker.

"We are a very transparent business, we have a flat structure, so everyone’s very aware of everyone else," he says. "I know every single person at Reflex. That’s as a result of getting around and talking to people."

And Reflex’s organic approach to HR works well because the firm is careful to recruit only the sort of people who will thrive within this dynamic.

Parker reports that he and other senior members of the team can usually tell pretty quickly in a job interview whether a prospective employee will take to the ‘Reflex way’.

"Whenever we talk to people, it’s pretty obvious whether they get us or they don’t," he says. "What we’ve been very good at is finding people who are very good leaders, who lead in a way that’s encouraging and empowering rather then overbearing."

The result
The benefits of working this way are manifest, in Parker’s view, in all that the company has achieved.

"There’s no secret to Reflex’s success and growth – it’s down to the people on the bus," he says. Citing specific examples of how refusing to enforce prescriptive job titles aids the business is therefore difficult, as, in Parker’s words, "People helping in different areas just happens all of the time."

One specific example, however, is employee Jessica Henderson who, after starting in the company’s sales team was, thanks to Reflex’s cross-boundary approach, able to show her aptitude for marketing and communications.

"It became obvious really quickly that this person could drive us in a different way," says Parker. "We’re a bunch of old farts who can’t do Twitter and she said ‘you need to do internet’. So she moved from sales, where she was an okay player, to marketing where she’s got a strong skillset. It’s been great for the business."

Another example, is the restructuring of Reflex’s Boston site when acquired from another company four years ago. Rather than just continuing business as usual, with the current management structure, Reflex looked at who might best lead the team, and who was naturally doing this anyway.

"It’s now run by two women who were already in the business, doing very well, but no one ever considered they had the capabilities," reports Parker. "We’re looking for people who can always do more, people who can grow in their role no matter what their background is.

"Sometimes you just have to allow people to move around the team to get the best out of them and find where they best flourish."

A crucial marker of success, says Parker, is how contented the Reflex workforce is.

"Our staff turnover is very low indeed," he says. "A lot of us have worked in businesses that are very hierarchical. It’s refreshing to move here from a business where, when you write an email, you have to copy your boss and their line manager and their line manager’s side manager just to get something done. People enjoy the freedom they have in Reflex. So they tend to stick with us."

And rumours of how refreshingly different Reflex’s way of doing things is, ensure fresh, strong talent is consistently coming the firm’s way when it does recruit, reports Parker.

"You’d be surprised how many people want to work for us to fill all sorts of roles," he says. "It’s word of mouth; we’re a good employer, we look after people, we don’t hide behind corporate governance or mess people around."
 
The verdict
So despite sounding slightly bizarre, refusing to implement official job descriptions has in fact proved a very sensible way of managing people for Reflex. And despite perhaps sounding an almost pointlessly simple measure – whose only consequence might be to create confusion over responsibilities – its impacts on Reflex have been profound.

Parker concedes, however, that this HR style might not suit all businesses. He says its success at Reflex may be due to the initiative growing organically right from the business’s outset. So it might not be as successfully implemented where a more formal structure and hierarchy are already in place.

"It works for Reflex. I’m not saying it would work anywhere else," says Parker. "I imagine the culture at Apple is very different from that at Microsoft. I think that’s a good analogy – you wouldn’t force the Apple business model on Bill Gates, yet both are very successful companies."

Nonetheless, Reflex might be taken by other companies as a strong example of how fruitful it can be to dispense with convention.
Whether company directors encourage employees to think outside the box by dispensing with job titles, or themselves think outside the box to scrutinise similar potentially restrictive conventions, fresh thinking is surely always a good thing.

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COMMENT
Job titles have often been a contentious issue. At best they are an indication of the role and responsibility of the member of staff, at worse, an attempt to pacify, control or even pander to the employee themselves. There are many examples where, due to legislation or even customer culture, job titles have evolved to have little meaning.  

The challenge with Reflex’s approach is giving the workforce flexibility to develop, but ensuring that work doesn’t fall through any gaps. There are always going to be parts of the business that are more appealing to work in than others, so making sure that the whole process is being carried out, in the most effective way, is essential. And printers will need to follow Reflex’s example of getting the right staff in to start with.

But if done correctly this approach can be a key way of embracing lean manufacturing, a concept the BPIF has always championed. Though production processes might seem most ripe for a lean manufacturing approach, with levels of waste constantly measured so they can be identified and reduced, wasteful use of human resources can be just as damaging to a business. If carried out well, Reflex’s strategy will free up time for free thinking, with both management and staff able to think about how to take the business forward.  

Of course, the model of diminished job titles may not be appropriate for all businesses. But all might want to consider empowering staff to make continual improvements by simplifying process and removing waste. This will undoubtedly improve the business as a whole. No ambiguity in that.

Philip Thompson, head of BPIF Business