34 | “We’re on a journey of continuous improvement and that’s helping us to get our people on board with the transition. It’s about building on the bond between process workers and management so that we are more of a collaborative team.” T T Future focused - page 36 REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT - SOUTH CANTERBURY Silver Fern Farms Pareora Generations of families work at plant T T Richard Loader Pareora Site Manager Bruce McNaught with Barrie Ramsay at a function marking Barrie’s retirement after working for 56 years at the plant. New Zealand’s meat processing industry is steeped in colourful stories about proud generations of families working for the same meat processing plants and one such story is about the Longman’s of South Canterbury. In 1903 Edward Longman was one of the many workers involved in the construction of the Pareora sheep and lamb freezing works built for the Canterbury Frozen Meat Co Ltd. When the plant was officially opened on the 7th of April 1904 Edward stayed on as Foreman in the muster floor, a role he continued right through to 1962 when he retired and was replaced by his son Gordon. The family tradition was continued when Gordon retired as Foreman in the muster floor in 1980 and his son Kevin accepted the baton change. When Kevin finally retired in on the 11th of September 2020 he had completed half a century’s service at the Pareora plant, which had by then become part of Silver Fern Farm’s suite of processing plants, and the Longman family had been part of the journey for 116 years. Site Manager Bruce McNaught says while the number of intergenerational families working in the industry are now becoming less and less, Pareora still has many team members who have clocked up many years service at the plant and form the backbone of experience. “Just this week we had the retirement of a gentleman by the name of Murray Tiffen after forty eight years and nine months service. “The Tiffen family name has been in this plant for quite some time. “Another guy, Barrie Ramsey, retired last year after fifty-six years service and there’s another guy who’s seventy years of age and still does all the butchery jobs. He says he has no intention of retiring any time soon. “For these people and many like them it’s about the friendships and camaraderie they have on site.” Silver Fern Farm’s Pareora site is one of the largest employers in South Canterbury region with around 840 staff at peak. Bruce says the current head count is around 750 people on site, including 60 salaried positions and 48 full time waged positions. The balance are deemed seasonal but, save for a couple of weeks planned maintenance shut down each year, their season runs all year round. “Depending on where we are at in the year we will bring on a third chain, but this year we just haven’t been able to get staff because the availability of resources is just not there. “All employers are struggling with it. South Canterbury unemployment is just so low.” While Pareora employs a lot of semi-skilled people who can do a variety of jobs within the plant Bruce says there is a very diverse range of quite specialist skills within the team. “There are people out in the animal assembly area who deal with animals every day and animal welfare is such a huge part of the business that we put a lot of focus on. “Those people have their own skill sets in terms of managing large numbers of animals. So it starts there and goes right through our processes, with people on computers and people grading livestock. “We have people who step up from the floor and go into supervisory roles with aspirations to go further. I came from the floor. “So there are incredible career opportunities for those people who want to seek them — but of course not everybody does. There are many who are happy to remain on the process line.” In the six years that Bruce has been with the Pareora plant he has witnessed a massive shift in the way Silver Fern Farms does business, with a cultural shift from being a co-op based freezing works to being recognised as a modern day food-manufacturing facility that is customer and consumer focused. “We take the raw material and convert it into a high quality saleable product that is shipped around the world and which is highly sought after by our markets. “We’re on a journey of continuous improvement and that’s helping us to get our people on board with the transition. It’s about building on the bond between process workers and management so that we are more of a collaborative team. It is bit by bit. “We’re not where we ultimately want to be but it is a journey and at least we’re taking those steps and it is really people focused,” says Bruce. He says while developing the right work culture is always a work in progress, in recent times people and their well-being have been a key focus for the business. “There have been a lot of initiatives put in place to help people, because they are our biggest asset, and that is right across the board. One of those initiatives is Ora Be Well, which is a self-assessment tool that looks at people’s physical and mental well-being. “We also have work place support systems. “And mental wellbeing is a concern for us, not just about what happens in the work place, but the outside influences that impact on our people.”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDc2Mzg=