When Employee Longevity Makes a Difference
The decline in employee loyalty is well documented in trade and business publications these days. To read the headlines, we’d expect all companies to be a constant churn of employees coming and going. The most recent figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics seem to support that perception: the average employee will switch employers about every four years.
With a history that goes back to 1981, the average tenure of a TRL employee is 5.5 years. Those 220 or so employees are led by an impressively tenured management team with upwards of two and three decades of TRL industry experience themselves. That kind of longevity is a key indicator of a well-functioning organization, according to Talent Management and HR News: “If you look at Fortune‘s 100 best companies to work for lists, you’ll very rarely see a company that doesn’t have a long-term leadership in place. Even for companies that have been around for only a short period of time, you’ll see that in most cases, the original founders and many of the key players are still in place.
Who benefits the most from that longevity? TRL System’s customers, of course. “Nobody out there can match the depth of knowledge and experience of our people,” says Mark Purdy, CEO at TRL. “The capabilities of our service technicians, installers and IT team set us apart, bar none.”
In fact, facilities often call upon TRL to maintain older, obsolete systems with which other less-tenured teams have no experience. “We have a service department that can pretty much fix anything,” notes COO Jeff Purdy. “The tenure that our group brings to a project is a great asset to customers. Our people have so much industry knowledge and experience, they are able to go in and fix issues that others haven’t been able to resolve. Even if it is a system we didn’t install, we are ready and able to help because of the longevity of our team.”
That was the case when global shipping giant SSA Marine needed someone to clean up its existing security system. “TRL provided a knowledge base that is unsurpassed in their industry,” says Curt Campbell, director of maritime security & OSHA safety in SSA Marine’s Office of Special Projects & Grants. “They were able to come into my project, and not only clean up someone else’s mess, but go on to interpret what I was asking for based on challenging and ambiguous requirements and create a total solution. The TRL security team was phenomenal.”
TRL’s loyal employees bring another invaluable benefit to customers in the form of the long-standing relationships they have developed over the years with regulatory agencies such as the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. “We know codes inside and out, and have very good relationships with these key organizations built on years of working together,” Jeff Purdy says. “Our technicians are able to drive projects efficiently from beginning to end so that customers are up and running without delay.”
Even manufacturers turn to the TRL team to vet new products before they are rolled out to the market. “We have some really smart guys working for us, and our vendors have figured that out,” says CEO Purdy. “Many of our vendors will give us their new products before they release them, let our IT and R&D teams test them out and provide feedback based on their knowledge of the market’s needs and use cases.
“Our vendors recognize the talent we have here, and we are able to use that institutional knowledge to help them zero in on solutions that best serve our customers,” he adds. “The vendors win, but in the end, our customers are the ones who really reap the benefits of being a part of the TRL family.”