Reducing Employee Turnover by 50%

The company operates over 40 divisions across the United States, providing comprehensive packaging manufacturing services.

Boasting an annual revenue of over two billion dollars and a continually expanding team of more than four thousand employees, they specialize in producing cutting edge corrugated packaging, folding cartons, and coated label stock.

Despite their industry leading low turnover rate, a high number of their veteran workforce is approaching retirement. They are anticipating unexpected turnover at a record high level. With aggressive hiring and expansion goals, this manufacturer sought better training and onboarding to help support expansion and prepare for new production equipment.

To prepare for the tsunami of oncoming retirement, proactive hiring became a top priority to shore up their workforce. To accommodate new hires, a strategy was devised to instill day one confidence and ensure their long term retention.

From a job execution standpoint, the company had work instructions and SOPs documented, but not in an accessible manner. Workers needed easy access to those materials at work stations across a variety of environments, from their paper mills to the corrugated packaging production lines.

More importantly, the company hired 100 employees in 2022, but ended the year with only 6 people staying. Exit interview data revealed negative impressions from recently departing staff who claimed work instructions were confusing, and thus safety concerns were high.

Turnover was starting to rear its ugly head, which led to significant issues like increased scrap waste, overtime, safety incidents and delayed workflows. The company anticipated 20% turnover within the next five years (compared to their 6% retention rate in 2022), and they knew that using their current outdated and unsophisticated training program would make that a permanent number.

For employee transition, a big chunk of their workforce is on the way out. And that expertise needed to be captured before they departed. Many workers with deep operational expertise are either no longer around, or won’t be soon.

The customer used Dozuki to train new hires and manage employee transition. In reference to the new hire challenge, their Quality Engineer stated:

“We needed a standardized training program that helps new hires understand machines better, beyond just pressing buttons and seeing things happen.”

With their old manual and “watered down” documentation overwhelming team members and leading them to self-select to quit, the ability to use Dozuki to pull up process documentation on tablets was immediately embraced.

Sparking a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Although the company had a high amount of packaging documentation across all departments, some of the content their seasoned employees had never seen before. This confirmed the operational value of the connected worker solution.

Dozuki has given the team leads opportunities to incentivize and engage employees, which they are confident will lead to long term retention. The company’s Focused Improvement Project Coordinator told one story that’s emblematic of that empowerment:

“One of the team’s younger coordinators has been training strictly on Dozuki. She found three or four errors on her first day. The guides she brought to our attention were corrected so everyone could improve their own processes. We’ve been rewarding her (and anyone who uses Dozuki to uncover continuous improvement opportunities) with vending bucks. They can spend that money at our in-house pop up shop in the break room for snacks and drinks."