Related Posts

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  4 Reasons Why Your Employee Comfort Should Come First

  “Comfort” is an interesting word that we use a lot at Cambridge.  Since we are an HVAC company, it is usually in context with making sure the people in your industrial facility are breathing fresh, tempered air, or making sure that your employees in high-bay buildings aren’t freezing in the dead of winter. There’s also “comfort” in the realm of making sure your employees know that you’ve got their backs and have a genuine interest in their personal health and professional growth.  (see blogs on Dale Carnegie Leadership Training and Stretching Your Way to Workplace Safety to generate ideas of how to boost comfort both personally and professionally).   Still, most companies overlook the importance of physical employee comfort, and are losing real talent and real opportunity to grow with those employees when they leave to pursue a workplace that can meet and exceed their basic requirements of a healthy working environment.   Not convinced? Here are four reasons that we think will back us up.   Safety protocol alone is reason enough. According to OSHA – your workers have the right to working conditions that do not pose ...
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  The Power of Redefining the Employer/Employee Relationship - Cambridge Culture Unleashed

  This blog was guest-written by Meg Brown, Director of HR at Cambridge Engineering.  The goal was 10 applicants for each opening. In a tight labor market? There’s no question: this is the most difficult time to build engaged teams in a generation. There are so many interests competing for attention. From finding workers, to upskilling them -- how can we make sure we attract the right people in the first place? We’d have to be crazy to attempt it!    Then call us crazy because we have supersized our recruitment pipelines and enabled historically low turnover. Through a combination of people-centric leadership and innovative recruiting/development programs, we have redefined the employer/employee relationship.  Allow me to explain.  Cambridge doubles production in the 3rd and 4th quarter, especially on our S-Series HTHV heaters, which naturally coincide with the colder weather. For many years we have surged with seasonal employees who spend 4-6 months working for Cambridge through our busy season. A few years ago we began hiring for cultural fit over experience, believing we can provide thorough in-house training. While that helped, we were ...

• Cambridge Engineering Travels to Xylem Design for Global Lean Leadership Summit

  Watch this great video about a recent trip our leadership team took to Xylem Design in Fort Collins, CO for a Global Lean Leadersship Summit. Learn how Xylem eliminates waste and romoves that which they struggle with in they daily activities. Let us know what you think about these Lean efforts.
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  Scrum: The Art of How an Overtasked Engineering Department Turned Their Work from Frenzied to Feasible

  Though the practice of scrum is fairly new to Cambridge (has only been actively applied in three of our 56 year existence) it has already helped us formulate a new approach to goal setting and how we will ultimately achieve those goals. More importantly, we are using it to address safety practices and protocols within Cambridge, so that every one of our fellow employees makes it home at the end of the day. After being introduced to the scrum concept (grouping agile thinkers together that stress constant communication to achieve complicated tasks and goals) in J.J. Sutherland’s book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, a group of Cambridge engineers volunteered to be trained in the practice by Toyota scrum expert Nigel Thurlow and apply it within the Cambridge walls, thus becoming our first four certified Scrum Masters. See their story and how their daily work has changed over the past few years. To catch a glimpse of Nigel Thurlow’s on-site scrum training at Cambridge - make sure to check out our blog on his visit!

• People Comfort - How Does It Effect Your Bottom Line?

  For the last 3 years my team has been traveling North America visiting with Cambridge Engineering’s, Sales Representatives to spread the word about options available to Building Owners, Building Operators, Design Engineers, Contractors and Utilities when recommending and selecting heating and ventilation solutions for their building or retrofit projects. We have been attempting to call out 3 core concepts for the key influencers when considering improvements to their buildings. 1.) Safety - Use of 100% outside air, direct fired HTHV and MAU technology is inherently safe. Ventilation and Heat are provided by the same blower that cannot be separated. These technologies can improve indoor air quality. Ventilation is the key to safety, preventing the buildup of products of combustion. 2.) Energy Efficiency - HTHV technologies provide the highest btus/cfm ratio thus creating more net useable btus or heat to satisfy the air load and the conductive load in high bay warehouses, distribution centers and manufacturing facilities. 3.) Lowest Total Installed Cost - HTHV technologies deliver 3 system in 1 piece of equipment. HTHV technologies deliver A.) Heat, B.) ...
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  Nigel Thurlow Trains Cambridge on Scrum

  We had the privilege of welcoming Nigel Thurlow, Chief of Agile at Toyota Connected to Cambridge to train us on the fundamentals of how Scrum, Lean and Agile all work together in a beautiful equilibrium. As many of our Scrum teams are off and running, this was a great opportunity to review and realign to keep the momentum going. Watch the video below to see how we took advantage of having Nigel onsite for 8 hours! To find out more about the initial Scrum training that Cambridge sought out from Nigel, make sure to see our previous blog post on Learning Scrum - The Toyota Way!