July 2024 - the seventh month of NOBO AUTO

The beginning of August is here and with it another part of the blog about the construction of the NOBO AUTO production plant in České Budějovice. Even though July and August are holiday months, the construction of our hall has not stopped and neither have we.

Business briefing

I have been in HR for over 10 years. In that time I have heard countless times from colleagues, employees, candidates or even students on internships that companies communicate poorly with them. That they don't know what their company is doing, where it is going, don't understand management's decisions or outright consider them wrong and illogical. Lack of communication is a frequently cited reason by candidates considering changing jobs. There are 22 of us in the company so far, so information is obviously easier to share than in companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. Even so, we have set communication standards from the outset that we will require at all levels in the company. This essential element is the regular sharing of information.

Among other things, we have already set up:

1:1 = regular 1:1 meetings that each employee has with his/her direct supervisor every week
Daily KPI = daily morning meeting where the main KPIs and events of the last working day are reported
4 weeks = every Tuesday we present to all company employees the progress of individual departments over a longer time horizon, specifically over the last 4 weeks
Business briefing = a quarterly meeting with all employees to discuss progress over the last quarter and the outlook for the next quarter

And since you could count the number of our employees on one hand in the first quarter of 2024, we started with a business briefing from the end of the second quarter, i.e. now in July. And because it was the first ever meeting of this type, we wanted to take employees outside of the standard workplace and celebrate the progress we've made together in the first 6 months of the company. It was a great event - interesting presentations by colleagues, nice venue, good refreshments and each employee took home a small gift from the event - a backpack with a drinking bottle and a functional trick = preparation for the joint hike to Klet' that awaits us in August.

New arrivals

Also during July and early August, we welcomed a new colleague to our company. He joined us Oleksii Bikanov as SQA engineer in the quality department, Petar Ivanov as production manager, Martin Eichner as a logistics engineer and Markéta Štabrňáková as assistant director.

New domain and company website

In July we migrated to a new domain - my new email is david.havelec@nobo-auto.cz. If you've experienced email migration with all your OneDrive data, regular Outlook meetings, and Teams conversations, you'll know that it's a great experience with no hitches and everything always works like a charm. And it was the same for us. But as one of my colleagues said - better to do it now, when there are 20 of us and we have data "only" a few months away, than when there will be hundreds of us. In the end we managed the migration well, we didn't lose any data and now we are operating under a new domain - so if you want to communicate with any of your colleagues, emails are always set as jméno.příjmení@nobo-auto.cz.

Along with the new domain, we have started working on the company and career pages, which we hope to publish by the end of the summer. I just wrote some of their content today and I feel more like a writer than an HR manager. Once the site is up and running, I'll release another blog and we'll be calling 3x kudos and hooray and of course expecting a crowd of candidates outside our company gates. Especially for my blog readers, here's a little taste of the upcoming site:

Arrival of colleagues from China and rental of apartments

During July, a group of colleagues from China arrived in the Czech Republic. I prepared the following video for my colleagues with the help of artificial intelligence.

video for colleagues from China

The first person to write in the comments below what I say in the video has lunch on my Deck.

My colleagues will now be living here for the next few years, so it was a good idea to find accommodation where they could live. As China has not signed the Warsaw or Geneva Conventions, my colleagues cannot drive cars in the Czech Republic at the moment, as their driving licence from China is not valid here. So we were looking for properties where there are more apartments together and at the same time they are in close proximity to our plant in Borsov. We managed to rent 8 apartments in a new apartment complex in Borsov nad Vltavou, where our colleagues will move this coming weekend.

Not to write only about how great and wonderful everything is, and how beauty always replaces splendour - during meetings with potential suppliers I have unfortunately already encountered that some of them want to grease their pockets on new companies. The most recent such experience was just when renting eight apartments in one property.

Charging a rental commission of over 150,000 CZK for two half-hour meetings and one generic contract prepared in advance arouses all sorts of feelings in me, but there is certainly no understanding and enthusiasm among them.

Visit to the new building

And to end today's story depressed and hurt, I'm adding a few more photos from the visit to the construction of our building last week.

By the end of the year we want to fill 12 more positions for which we do not have a final candidate. We will continue recruiting next year. If you would like to work for us, please message me here or send your resume to david.havelec@nobo-auto.cz or give me a call at 724 337 081 and we'll see if we have a position that might fit your profile.

I wish you all a wonderful summer.

David Havelec

HR Manager in Nobo Automotive Czech Republic

5 August 2024