People Are Our Greatest Resource

People Are Our Greatest Resource

The most important asset we have in our business is our people. When new people join the Naylor team, it is often an enduring commitment for both the company and them. They stay with us as we provide them with the resources and experience to develop their soft skills and management abilities, and as the years go on, we continue to provide lifelong training in their area of expertise. Today, eighty per cent of our executive management team member’s hold MBA’s, and all of them save for me obtained their degrees while still holding fulltime positions with the company.

We provide our people with the cutting edge tools necessary to perform their jobs as efficiently as possible, because our forte is service. Our employees are the face of our company, and they are the best and largest resource we have to distinguish ourselves from the competition. Naylor’s defining business strategy is to have a technically skilled workforce that is highly motivated and in sync with company objectives, while properly managing our labour input to ensure that we have the resources to complete all current projects.

About 90% of our field people are certified by the Ontario government’s trade certifying process, because their jobs are considered craft trades. And while Ontario had a long history of unionization in this area, today fewer than half of the craft trades we provide are represented by international unions – companies like us and nonunion contractors are the areas where future growth in employment will occur. This trend is affecting almost every industry except the public sector, and it seems to be related to an increasing corporate awareness about the importance of treating employees with fairness, respect, and paying proper wages.

Our field forces are still represented by The Association, which functions independently from other unions and has its own rules and regulations. The Association provides our field people with representation at the most senior level of the company. Through their elected officials, they can share their views about how they are treated, and provide feedback on the consistency of our human resources programs throughout the company. We also guarantee quick resolution of issues, because they are dealt with immediately at our regular monthly meetings.

Naylor’s people philosophy is quite simple, and has remained the same since 1984. We search out the best people in our industry, we

require them to be the best they can possibly be, and in return, we pay them the highest rates and provide an industry-leading benefit package. Our annual holiday allowance is based on seniority, rather than the industry average of two weeks, we have a profit sharing program with every employee who has been with us for over a year, and we try to ensure that our field employees are among the highest paid in their trades in this market. We also give each field employee a seniority position, which dictates how discharges are made during rare layoffs, and how their bonus pool is distributed.

People might think that we lose too much money or charge clients too much because we pay our employees more than our competitors. But our attitude is this: we do not want to operate in a market where clients are only concerned with finding the cheapest contractor. Early on in my career, I came across a quotation from John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) that truly resonated with me, and I have used it as a personal and corporate modus operandi for the past 40 years:

“It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money—that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot—it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”

I have always believed that the best way to operate a business is by providing customers with something better, and one way we do this is through our multi-trade service capability. While international trade unions dictate what work can be performed by which tradesperson, Naylor’s people are governed only by the rules of their own association. This means that we circumvent the inefficiencies in the construction and servicing of equipment that other internationally unionized companies encounter. In fact, we have always encouraged our field employees to pursue training in more than one trade. Specifically, we request that our service electricians and those working in our mechanical trades (plumbing, HVAC, and sheet metal) also become licensed for gas fitting. Multi-licensed employees mean we can send fewer people to each project, which translates into three benefits; we can service more clients at one time, it is more cost-effective for everyone, and our employees have more diversity in their jobs.

Similarly, our apprentices are also encouraged to train in our other trades. We have a very comprehensive technical training program that is run by suppliers, outside consultants, and our own qualified personnel. The more skills an apprentice can bring to the job, the more rewarding the job, and the more efficient we become as a company. Our office staff is likewise offered opportunities to expand their horizons. Almost 50% of our new job postings are filled by internal applicants, because we always encourage our office people to ask what skills they can obtain to facilitate a move into another position or department within the company, if they so choose. In the future, this process will become much easier as we perfect our Naylor Institute of Training program.

Dave Arcaro at Erindale II, February 1988. One exciting (and self-imposed) challenge we are currently facing is the idea of expanding our operation into new geographical areas, in particular the United States. It is a challenge for us because we do not want to expand the company at the expense of our corporate culture; namely, we do not want to lose the Naylor way of approaching interpersonal connections. This is expressed in the way we treat employees, customers, suppliers, and each other. This kind of thing cannot be imposed on a workplace, so we would have to relocate enough people who understand Naylor’s values so that the culture would be maintained in the new location, and imparted upon the rest of the local personnel. We are very enthusiastic at this new prospect, and eager to offer exciting opportunities to our people, like moving to a new location, starting a new chapter in Naylor’s history, and taking on more senior managerial positions within the company.

We are currently looking at Charlotte, South Carolina as our first foray into the United States. We have two Naylor people who have stepped up and want to give it a try, Steve Meyer and James Forbes. The operation will be starting in the Spring of 2015.