The challenge
“Happy, but never satisfied.” As company, and indeed life, mottos go, North Yorkshire-based Ryedale Group’s is pretty good. But it could also be potentially quite hard to apply. Striving for constant improvement is of course a highly valuable aim for any business. But how do you ensure this really happens?
The answer, the company decided in 2007, was to aim for an Investors in People (IIP) Gold framework. The company was already IIP certified, an award achieved back in the mid 1990s. But back then this was more a case of being audited and awarded for systems and a culture the company already had in place, rather than working to be even better.
Not that Ryedale was doing badly by any stretch. The firm had come a long way since starting life in the early 1950s as a local commercial printer set up in Helmsley by current director James Buffoni’s grandfather George Buffoni. Moving premises several times over the years, the business is now based on an industrial estate in Kirbymoorside, in a building that was originally built as a steel foundry and with an older storage building featuring bullet holes in the roof from wartime strafing runs by the Luftwaffe.
By 2007, the company had an established reputation in plastic printing, specifically for horticultural products such as labels, POS and packaging, and was doing very well in this and several other sectors. Such a specialist business model required very special people, however, and it was felt that an even more innovative and progressive approach could be implemented with a more formal staff management programme.
“We’re not a responsive company we’re a proactive, progressive company, so we do a lot of R&D and experiments. We’re always trying to do new things, whether it’s with people, processes or products, because we’re in a very challenging market,” says Buffoni.
The challenge Ryedale’s specific business model faced, he explains, is the seasonal nature of the horticultural sector. In order to thrive and keep innovating, the firm needed highly motivated and flexible staff.
“We’re a very seasonal business so we have a very busy winter and then in the spring when we’re much less busy in production, we d go into innovation mode,” explains Buffoni. “That’s become a central feature of Ryedale. All the people here have to be very used to change and have to be quite dynamic. We go through a hugely demanding season where we do about a quarter of our turnover in one month, stress all our systems to destruction then look at it and think about what worked and what didn’t work – what do we fix?”
Another challenge specific to Ryedale is its location. “We’re in a very rural area so we haven’t got a huge labour pool,” says Buffoni. “So we want to get people and turn them into good people, or get good people and keep them.”
The method
The way to achieve an IIP Gold certification is to work towards a very structured framework of goals. Indeed, this is the beauty of the system, explains Buffoni. “They have a very transparent framework for implementation, it’s pre packed. It’s all based around ‘plan, do, review’. You have 10 areas within this, such as strategy, learning and development, management effectiveness, performance measurement and continuous improvement. And in those 10 areas you’ve got 174 checkpoints and they’re traffic-lighted so you can see exactly where you’re at.”
To achieve enough green lights in this comprehensive list to be awarded Gold, the firm decided to enlist external support and to appoint an in-house champion to work with this consultant. “We did this because we’re not a fat company and we don’t have endless resources,” says Buffoni. “We didn’t have any experts in-house. So we gave an HR adviser the objective of getting us to Gold as quickly as possible. We let them loose across the business and gave them full support.”
Firstly, it was a case of assessing how each person could be working even better to serve the company’s overall goals. “The IIP scheme encourages you to do value chain mapping,” explains Buffoni.
“So we looked at all the roles in our business. We share with people the big company goals we have – that’s a balance of growing sales, reducing costs, keeping a positive cashflow, keeping the right people in the right place and keeping one eye on the future. Then within their own department, people will have much more focused goals. Then we link those job descriptions to departmental objectives and those through to company objectives.”
Next, it was a case of more closely monitoring how effectively all individuals’ targets were being met. “It was measuring production figures and gathering qualitative information from people they worked with about how well they were doing,” says Buffoni.
Training has been critical to helping people meet these targets, says Buffoni. This consists of a mixture of in-house and BPIF programmes. “Everybody in the company has gone through the BPIF level-three customer service programme, we’ve got a number of people who are going to do a level-three management programme and then about four or five people going through level-five,” says Buffoni. “So we’ve put a lot of time into training. It’s difficult because we’re doing it on top of work so it’s a real commitment. But we’re saying now to staff that to be fit for purpose for your job in the future you need to be not only good now, but fit for the labour pool, where qualifications are very valuable.”
The final stage of the IIP process is of course being assessed. This is a rigorous process not to be taken lightly, says Buffoni. In Ryedale’s case it took an IIP auditor around four half-day visits to go round the firm and talk to all staff about how well they were being supported to do their jobs.
“They talked to all of our staff, they looked at the company’s strategy, the policy, the management objectives and then they looked at whether or not the staff were meeting the objectives. They talk to everybody, get all the different views; everybody from the cleaner all the way through to the MD.”
The result
Although Ryedale missed the Gold standard by a “gnat’s whisker” when assessed in 2010, achieving silver instead, the team persevered, achieving Gold in 2011.
This is obviously a great PR story to tell customers. “We have this bang on the front of the building; only 250 organisations in the UK have got the Gold standard,” says Buffoni. “Not all customers appreciate it; some people just want the cheapest product, but we much prefer to deal in sustainable partnerships anyway, and those customers definitely value this.”
Much more important than this has been the way it’s transformed the Ryedale way, however. Buffoni explains that the IIP system has enabled the firm to not only train new starters up to a high standard, but also attract the very best talent from around the country, with people keen to work for a firm with such strong emphasis on staff development.
“Staff retention’s been outstanding. We had a guy work for us for 56 years. We’ve taken people in from the local area and turned waitresses into fantastic sales people,” he reports.
He adds: “A nice outcome is we’ve been able to attract some of the very best talent in our core markets to come and work for us. We’re talking about people from the other end of the country leaving fantastic jobs at large organisations. We give them something they couldn’t get there; they love the energy. A lot of people who visit us say they just don’t see the same buzz very often.”
Having such a motivated and talented workforce, has been key to all Ryedale’s successes over the past two years, feels Buffoni. In terms of the nitty gritty of everyday running of the business, cases of absence reduced year on year since 2007, rework levels decreased by 75% in 2012 compared to 2013 figures, and customer dissatisfaction incidents reduced from 50 negative cases per week to five cases in six months.
But the effects have been much more far-reaching than this. Buffoni believes the overall shape and direction of the company would be completely different today had it not been for IIP Gold. A key success has been branching from serving three sectors in 2007 to working with seven, including hotels, conferences and exhibitions and education, today. The company has now even added a Ryedale Design & Build construction arm, to insulate it from the seasonal nature of horticulture work. The success of this Buffoni attributes to being able to absorb any group of workers, no matter how disparate, into a strongly defined Ryedale ethos.
The company has been able both to branch into new sectors and improve its offering in established ones, by becoming more solutions- rather than process-focused, explains Buffoni. A key success in the latter has been the development in 2012 of Hortiboard, a biodegradable substrate that Ryedale identified a need for after becoming better at problem solving. “The Hortipak brand has allowed us to get outside of horticultural labels into packaging and promotions as well,” reports Buffoni.
So for Ryedale: success. The cost of overhauling performance management in this way shouldn’t be underestimated notes Buffoni, with the initial £500 for a half-day introduction, and audit costs, only the tip of the iceberg. But for Buffoni going for gold has been worth every penny.
He says: “The results have been priceless as our values and culture are central to everything we do.”
RYEDALE GROUP
Vital statistics
Location Kirbymoorside, North Yorkshire
Inspection host James Buffoni, director
Size Turnover: £7.5m; staff: 85 in low season, 140 in the peak horticultural season
Established In the early 1950s as a local commercial printer, evolving to become a specialist plastic printer in the 1980s, and now a horticulture labels, POS and packaging specialist and printer in seven key sectors including hotels and education. The business also now has a design & build construction arm
Kit Komori UV litho, Sakurai UV litho, smaller waterless Presstek, three Bobst die-cutters, Blumer Atlas Autoram with a robotic system on the back, converted Roland screen printer (into rotary cutter)
Inspection focus Achieving Investors in People Gold certification
DO IT YOURSELF
Following suit
Taking steps to better manage employees’ performance is of course something any business could benefit from. Not every firm will need an external auditor to do it, with smaller businesses perhaps more able to roll out their own, slightly less formal, system. “The opportunity is really for growing businesses, so owner-managed companies where people are perhaps looking to take on more staff but not able to manage them directly,” says Buffoni. “At that point you need a framework like this.”
Businesses may also want to consider other people management schemes, such as the BPIF’s Human Resources Seal of Excellence.
Potential pitfalls
“You’ve got to take it seriously; it’s not something you can just do for PR,” says Buffoni. “We did it because we wanted Ryedale to be a nice effective place to work. We wanted to do it properly and keep doing it forever. If it’s superficial you’re not really getting the benefit out of it.”
Top tips
Whether you’re working towards a specific standard or implementing performance management best practice more informally, consider using an external HR consultant if you don’t have the internal resources.
Talk to people about what sort of culture they want to be part of to improve more subtle things than just productivity, for example. “We talked to our people,” says Buffoni. “We said we want to be a positive organisation – what does that mean? We came up with a list of behaviours and attitudes that would support the overall company strategy.”
Learning from other companies can be as valuable as learning from IIP or HR consultants. Ryedale is now considering becoming a IIP Champion, helping others achieve this standard, for this very reason. “Just because we’re gold, it doesn’t mean we know it all; there’s loads to learn. Every time I go to another company I always take something away.”
Buffoni’s top tip
“We’re big proponents of giving freedom with accountability,” says Buffoni of how the company achieved IIP Gold. “My advice is talk to your people, keep them involved and give them the freedom.”
