Manufacturing the Morse lineup of industrial and power tool accessory products is truly a team effort, and a new program implemented this summer is hoping to further shine a spotlight on that for all employees.
Morse already hosts distributor and new employee training schools focused on our industrial and power tool accessories to help share product details, market differentiators, and technical information with attendees. 
In late June, the Morse team that leads these training schools — Alan Holbrook, Nithin Rangasamy, Justin Smith, and Pete Vandervaart — led our first internal training program, called “It Starts With Morse.” It was executed as part of a corporate 2024 goal to “optimize employee success by improving our recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, and retention of employees.”
“The training was structured differently than the distributor band and PTA schools. During a standard school, the focus is on how to use Morse product and how to sell it in the field. As our internal employees don’t need to know how to sell blades, we wanted to make the training more about the role they play in developing our products and how each area impacts one another,” Holbrook said. “We also wanted to talk about Morse’s history and culture for newer employees so they can gain a better understanding of the company.”
The program aims to teach attendees about the manufacturing process for all product lines, the markets our products serve, and how all departments work together toward the same goal.
The first class was a trial run with employees ranging in tenure of 5 to 40 years and allowed attendees to give feedback and suggestions. The one-day class worked well; the group was very interactive and shared a lot of experiences from their different departments. We hope to continue to put all interested employees through this program and start to include newer employees so they can feel more connected and want to stay part of the team in the long term.
To date, more than 70 employees have signed up to attend the program, with the goal of all going through the training by March 2025.
“We want to make people aware of our manufacturing process and our products – why do we do things a certain way. Why do we have certain checks on the blade and what would happen if the material is out of spec? Where do we use our products and for what applications?” Rangasamy said. “We want to give employees a hands-on experience with our cutting tools. Our hope here is giving them this broad understanding will emphasize the value they bring in.”
Comments from attendees were that they were impressed by “the amount of detail and thought that goes into each process;” felt the event “let me see clearly how the job I do affects the outcome of the blades;” and “would recommend this to everyone.”