Tools of the trade

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Time spent by a Managing Director working alongside their staff and experiencing their typical day’s work is time very well spent.

A study* found that employees who spent six hours with their leaders became 29% more inspired about their work, 30% more engaged, 16% more innovative and 15% more intrinsically motivated (finding something interesting in most of their tasks).

Playdale’s Managing Director, Barry Leahey, has set aside time in his busy diary to spend alongside staff in the various departments that span across the three south Cumbrian Playdale sites.

Most recently he spent a day in the combined factory areas of; Timber Shop, Joinery Shop and Clean Assembly here at Haverthwaite. You can see from the images that it was all hands on deck; there was no standing on the side lines with order deadlines to meet!

Barry’s first job of the day was working on the Morticer, using the chainsaw function to make slots in the ends of laminated timber posts for a number of our products, including Swing frames. He then moved onto the Jigsaw where is he was tasked with cutting the impact layer which forms part of one of our safety surfacing systems, to the correct size to be installed beneath an Aerial Runway.

Finally, he helped assemble the main end ‘face ‘feature of a Wiggles unit from our Caterpillar toddler exploration range. This, he discovered, is a three hour job which was a bit of an eye opener to him!

Barry thoroughly enjoyed his day and afterwards told us “Our standards even surprised me. Lewis supervised me and even rejected parts I thought were excellent! Everyone at Playdale has pride in quality which was great to see!”

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*Study carried out by research firm Leadership IQ

 

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